Something that can get confusing for site users is when you have created 'sections' of your site comprising of blocks, Views, Panels etc - often cases in Drupal 5, the menu system won't follow a Panel, for example as belonging to a menu item (it instead wants to refer to nodes only - which means that even if you use something like the Menu Trails module, you may run into problems).

A few days back the second Release Candidate of Drupal 6 was posted for download on Drupal.org .  I'll be blogging a bit over the next couple of weeks about some neat things that Drupal 6 features as opposed to previous releases of the CMS, but for now wanted to note that site theming is getting easier as versions of Drupal advance; which is an exciting development for anyone interested in making sites that are aesthetically unique and provide enjoyable user interfaces.

To get cracking in discovering how Drupal 6 can offer more power in site theming, be sure to watch Moshe Weitzman's screencast introducing the Theme Developer module; a new part of devel which lets you know what theme functions are being called on your site, as you look at it!  Sort of like a Web Developer toolbar or Firebug extension for Drupal :)

I *love* Drupal's simple RSS news aggregation system.  However, when adding my facebook status feed to my personal site just now I realised that a coding oversight restricts the automatic blocks created for aggregated feeds to a minimum of 2 posts.

Now, for something like showing your facebook status on a Drupal site, you probably only want to show one item - that being your latest status update, not the last 2 or 5 etc...  So, you'll need to go to 'modules/aggregator' and edit your copy of the aggregator.module file.

Look around line 269 for the following code - I've added a '1' to the array - this allows the aggregator blocks to offer you a display of just the most recent feed item.

Note: I found this issue with Drupal 5.1 - it may have been corrected since then...

One of the coolest stock features of Drupal is that it can display tables of node editing/adding activity to general site users - both for all activity on the site as well as per user (on their profiles).

Some of you may be familiar with this functionality from social networking sites like Facebook (the Wall on user profiles), and thus know that sometimes all information shouldn't show by default in these listings.  For example, you may not want to display every edit an admin makes to somewhat-static page content. 

Guess what?  Drupal's so cool - it not only shows you tracker info, but also lets you customize the display of it!  All you need is to firstly activate the tracker module, then install Views and activate the stock-packaged tracker view.