User import/Node Import, UTF characters and Excel
Many have encountered this unicode/utf encoding problems in their programming life. It is just a drag to make it right and without knowing all the stuff around it and understanding it you will have bugs and problems. You will usually import data to drupal with CSV files. It's fine until you start using non english alphabet. You will usually export your database as CSV from phpmyadmin which should do it fine and preserve unicode chars and save your csv file as UTF-8 file. So here is everything fine and if you import data like that it should import nicely.
User import Delimiter
If using user import module for drupal you could run into problems of delimiters. By default it uses comma and not much better solution which is semicolon, here is a patched filed that has constant on top if you want to change it manually
there are also patches for this to be used automaticly or choosen from admin interface but until this is used in dev or current version, quickest way is to grab file below which is current DEV version edited.
Printing out all variables
Before we learned how to print node variables now lets see how to get all variables that are present on page
<?php print_r(get_defined_vars()); ?>
</pre>
is put in the code on your page.tpl.php, maybe you can get some nicer view of this with devel module and kumo output.
Viewfield, reference views and view reference
Viewfield or reference views. Which to use? Well viewfield is a module where you add CCK filed and you can choose which view you want to have for this field to show. This can be default or can be overridden on node edit form. You can also pass arguments by default or change it on node edit. Reference views is just to change how node reference would look, so basicaly you change display fields.
Lightbox or Colorbox
Lightbox or Colorbox. I would say colorbox, its successor to thickbox, which i always liked, its smarter and just feels better. Maybe Lightbox has more features, but i see its missing one i really need and like, which is "Per post gallery" so all images on the post/page can be looked at with modal view(that black screen that goes over the content) continuous. Also it has option for login screen and has better looking default theme.
Form Block and reference field
Form Block module enables you to create nodes from block, so you can have some text and under it block for entering data for node type lets use "tips". This is similar to commenting then but you can have much more power this way. But how then do you connect this new node with current on screen? You add to that "tips" node type a reference field, that would connect it to node on which this data was entered.
CKEditor and IMCE file button
You installed your CKEditor and IMCE but there is only image dialogue on your node edit screen and you want to add plain file link.
Mass Email, Group Email or Newsletter
Thinking of implementing mass email to Drupal as you want to sent emails to your registered user? There are several options you could go with.
Twitter module - changing what is published to twitter when users submit nodes
We just changed what is published to Facebook in last post, lets do the same for twitter. I am gonna be layze and just change the original module, but you can build your custom and override it. So twitter module is the module we use and we open twitter_post.module file and edit it on twitter_nodeapi part. It is simple edit, simple additon to code. In replacement array we just add something to sent title, like below
