Drupal website developers and administrators benefit from its built-in feature to periodically check if any of the enabled modules and themes are out of date. Drupal performs this check daily or weekly, when its cron job is run, automatically. If there are any modules or themes in need of an update, then on the admin area's modules or themes "List" page, you will see the notification:

This guest post was written by Ben Hosmer, a Drupal user new to module development as well as an active member of the Florida Drupal user community. He often blogs about Drupal related topics at radarearth.com

One of the primary ways of keeping a Drupal site of any size running securely and at peak performance is to ensure that all of its modules stay updated. With thousands of modules in the Drupal eco-system, updates are released literally every day. Luckily, Drupal core's Update Status module helps site administrators keep notified of modules in need of updating.

Sometimes page caching can get in the way of your site's functionality - even for anonymous users. In those rare cases where you don't want page caching used, there's a module that allows you to exclude certain pages from being cached.

The Cache Exclude module has a simple configuration page where you can enter paths and pages on your site where you don't want caching to occur.

It's a great and simple solution to a sometime annoying problem.

Ever downloaded a module and noticed several obvious bugs? Often, you can look in the issue queue for a module and find fixes, code patches, and help with these problems. For certain modules, the maintainer of the code may not respond - he or she may no longer be developing with Drupal, may have changed his or her email address, or any number of other factors.

One of the many wonderful and useful forums over at groups.drupal.org is the Similar Module Review group.

I recently presented a talk at DrupalCon Paris titled, "45 Modules in 45 Minutes: The Best Modules You're Not Using".

I hand-picked 45 modules that were not among the top 100 most downloaded modules from Drupal.org for the period of June 21 - August 16, 2009.

There's a lot of times when you're building a site and trying to figure out the best way to do something. It doesn't matter if you're a newbie or a rockstar, if you're not familiar with a particular type of funcationality, you're going to need to do some homework to figure out the best solution.

One handy way of figuring out the best solution is by gathering up all the possible modules and comparing them. Unfortunately, this can be quick time-consuming. Luckily, there's an entire Drupal group devoted to exactly this!

If you've seen any of the Popups API videos, then you know how slick this API can make your site.

One of the first things I look at when a client asks me "why is my web site so slow" is the admin/build/modules page (actually, the first thing I look at is the client's internet connection). It's very rare that I don't find more than a couple of modules that are enabled for absolutely no reason - sucking down precious server resources.

Here's a few that I find most often - and are usually no-brainers to disable: