Every Drupal developer knows that there many configuration settings that are similar between the sites that they build, whether it's a personal preference or a trend among clients. And every developer that has been around Drupal more than a few minutes knows about the Features module.

I recently worked on a project where the main menu items were to be displayed as images. Of course, stylish menu items are usually displayed using text that's been styled with Cufón (or a similar solution) and using CSS sprites for the background. But in this case, there wasn't text.

Now, I could have worked on updating the Imagemenu module to work with Drupal 7, but there just wasn't enough time in the budget. So instead, I decided to use a hook in template.php to get the job done for me.

If there is a shortcoming in Drupal, its the way the menu system is handled. In this particular case, its that custom ID's for links added via the Menu Attributes module are added to the anchor tag and not the list item tag. While this is great for theming that particular link, it can cause difficulties when using most jQuery scripts to modify the display of your menus since the <li> tags won't have any identification.

You've finally gotten your Drupal website to the point where you feel like it is ready to go, but during final testing it seems painfully slow. With page loading speed a factor in customer retention (as well as search engine rankings), you need your pages to load as swiftly as possible.