Everybody wants something new for Christmas, and a lot of us are wishing for Drupal 8. Seems like it’s just around the corner! But if you understand version numbers and Dries Buyteart’s philosophy behind releases, you’ll find out you need to calm down a bit.

However, we can get a peek at what’s coming in Drupal 8 by checking the Drupal Initiatives, Knowing what to expect is critical to your decision on which platform to use today. When a stable version (Drupal 8.0) is released, Drupal 6 will no longer be supported or receive security updates, and you will need to upgrade your Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 7 at that time.

In this article we’re going to show you how to navigate the drupal site to find information on future Drupal releases and the intiatiatives that are guiding the development. At the same time we will introduce you to the new approach to Drupal development through “Initiatives.”

Theming Drupal is not a simple task, but people are trying to make it easier.

By using a base theme, that is predicated on a grid template, and implementing sub-themes, you can do some incredible designs in a short time.

The framework and base theme remain the same for every instance you create, but you can customize the block/regions, column layout, and css on each sub-theme in and endless chain. First link in this chain is getting the base theme and creating the first sub theme. We’re going to start forging that chain right now.

Drupal allows you to do lots of things.
But there are so many ways to do a simple task,
like taking a content field and putting it in a block, that simple way isn’t always obvious.

There are lots of ways to do it, but CCK Block allows you to create a block, and put one field inside of it. For example an image.

This lets you put an image or a text block from an article, page or any content type into any block position on your theme. You can even create special content types if you need them. The only restriction is that you can only put one field in each block. We’ll show you how it works, and you can use your creativity to apply it to your situation.