One of Drupal’s greatest strengths is it’s huge catalog of modules and themes. At the time of this writing, Drupal boasts over 15,000 modules and almost 1,500 themes on Drupal.org. The challenge is knowing which modules, themes to use and how to maintain them with custom code and other customizations throughout the life-cycle of a website. While there are tutorials and blogs out there that can help, there isn’t exactly an instruction manual on which modules to use and which to avoid for production sites.

Drupal 7’s release earlier this year came with a lot of changes to defacto standard Drupal features. One of the biggest changes is the introduction of the Fields system. Field, a core module in Drupal 7, replaces the Content Contstruction Kit (CCK) contributed module that’s been a part of Drupal since version 4.7. For those developers and content managers that are used to using CCK in past versions of Drupal, the new Field module opens a whole new way of thinking about content modelling in Drupal 7.

Hello again from DrupalCon in Chicago. Today began with some interesting statistics from George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss about the WiFi usage at the event - over 4,000 devices connected to the conference's network yesterday, and now Clay Shirky is delivering a keynote about social media. I'll post updates from sessions again today, beginning with a BOF session at 11 a.m. which I am eagerly awaiting.