I’m gearing up to comment on Tom Geller’s recent grumbles about the Drupal free documentation, but first I feel that I should point out the obvious: Drupal has some great paid documentation.

Any programming project — including Drupal projects — should use a version control system. My favorite such system is git. If you haven’t tried it I recommend that you learn all about it at the tutorial section of github, or from Peepcode’s git screencast.

Assuming that you understand the basics of git, let’s apply it to a Drupal project. The simplest strategy is to create a single git repository that holds everything in your project. You download Drupal core and modules (using FTP, the Update Status module, or drush) and you check them into git as you install them. Your custom changes get checked into the same git repository.

The blog has now been updated to Drupal 6. There aren’t a lot of visible differences yet (unless you are an IE6 user… you folks have been officially deprecated) — the very nice Drupal 6 theming improvements made it pretty easy to duplicate my old style, while cleaning it up a lot at the same time.

Some people have accused D6 of being both easier and harder to theme, but so far all I can perceive is the “easier” part, perhaps because I’ve been elbow-deep in the Drupal 5 theming functions and know how complicated that was.

I might be crazy, but as I read Steve Yegge’s essay on the Properties Pattern I felt as if I was being introduced to something I already knew. And that’s not just because the essay describes Javascript. I think that’s because Properties lists are the fundamental Drupal data structure.

This line stuck out:

I’ve talked about the main problems imposed by the Properties pattern: performance, data integrity, and navigability/queryability.

I have only three things to say about the heroic efforts of Mark Boulton to come up with a design for a Drupal wordmark that will satisfy the entire Drupal community.

First: Mark is a brave man.

Second: I hereby officially delegate my opinion on the Drupal wordmark to Mark, Dries Buytaert, Barry Jaspan, and Angie Byron. If they like it, I like it, by definition.

As I was setting up a new Drupal site, I decided to try out the hilariously named phpass module. (I cannot read that as “PH Pass” to save my life. It always comes out as… something else.)

The good news about this module is that it builds upon a PHP project called, um, phpass to add better password hashing to Drupal. The traditional way to handle passwords is to ask the user for one, compute a hash function on it, and store the hashed version. Unix systems use the Unix crypt utility to make the hash.