Spend some time researching Drupal online and you'll probably find a lot of griping about Drupal -- that it's hard to use, or difficult to understand. Lots of people run into roadblocks setting up their first Drupal site, from experienced developers to nontechnical experimenters. Some of this criticism is deserved, but some of it is excessive, and over time a number of Drupal myths have been built up. It's time to do some debunking!

1. You Need to Code to Use Drupal

This site gets traffic from all over the globe, and sometimes I want to present different blocks to different users based on where they're located. For example, I might want to feature content about internationalization to visitors from Europe. In my case, visitors from Kenya sometimes find this site when they are looking for Davetech Group Kenya, a local computer retailer. My goal was to make a block appear on each page when the visitor is located in Kenya, directing them to the Davetech Group website. Here's how I did it:

By default, Drupal is configured to force anonymous users to preview their comments before posting them. To enable users to post without previewing their comment, you might think you'd access:

Administer > Content Management > Content Settings > Post Settings

Not anymore!

In Drupal 6, the comment preview settings are tied to each content type. Visit:

Administer > Content Management > Content Types at admin/content/types