Drupal: Lessons Learned

During the conversion of our site to Drupal, I learned quite a few lessons that I'm sure will serve me well in the future.

• Enabling/disabling comments - While putting up the various content on the site I found that even though the commenting feature was disabled for some of the content types I had created some of the pages that were made from these content types still had comments enabled. I later noticed after days and days of searching for answers that pages I created after disabling the comments did in fact have the comments diabled. The only issue I had now was that I had to go back and disable the content on each individual page of the type that still had comments enabled. So the lesson here is - comments are only diabled for your specific content types only on the items that your create after disabling this feature and that all content created before diabling the content will still have the comments feature enable.
  
• Ubercart shopping cart showing up for anonymous users - After getting the store set up and working. I realized an anoying problem. The shopping cart was showing up, but only for anonymous users. I checked the shopping cart configuration only to find that the 'don't show cart when empty' options was enabled. Yet another headscratcher. After searching throught he forums at drupal.org, I finally found the answer I needed. While it didn't fix the problem it at least provided reasoning behind the problem. When caching is enabled, the shopping cart will show up for anonymous users. This is still a persistent problem but it's a problem that will have to be fixed by a bug fix by the urbercart group.
• HTML showing up in labels on permissions page - While converting our site over to Drupal, I put to use numerous modules provided by the Drupal community. It wasn't until way later that I noticed that when I went to my permissions page that I had some funky html tags showing up where the modules labels were supposed to be. I figured it had to be some kind of incompatibility problem with one of the modules. So the hunt was on. Several hours later I found the culprit. Seems that when you enable the devel theme module, it causes the problem I experienced on the permissions page. I disabled it and my permissions page returned to normal.

As I continue to work with Drupal, I learn more and more about its features and the capabilities. I read somewhere that with Drupal you can do anything.

I second that statement. I look forward to providing more insight on this platform in the future so keep checking back from more Drupal updates.