Coder1

The Drupal Search API is powerful and pretty intuitive, but finding details on how to do something as simple as enabling searching on fields other than title and body could be a little daunting.

It's actually quite a simple concept. Anything exposed to your node view will be indexed. You can easily accomplish this by editing your content type and setting the Display Fields setting to Plain Text.

:: 2008-09-25 update: i've fixed a lot of things since the .0 releases, so make sure you're using the nightly snapshots for the latest code ::

The ParaChat Drupal module embeds a ParaChat applet in your site and automatically logs in users with their Drupal username. There is access control so you can setup which roles you would like to be able to join the chat room. For added security, you can configure ParaChat to validate users from the ParaChat server before allowing them to join.

Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition has been released for Drupal 6!

While I haven't gone through the second edition yet, the book written for Drupal have has been an incredible resource. It is very well organized, easy to follow along with, and has plenty of code samples to help you on your way.

Pathauto is an awesome module, but there may be a time when, for one reason or another, don't want or don't need to use it.

custom_url_rewrite is a function (not a hook) available in Drupal which gives you an alternative to configuring custom paths and storing them in the database.

Since this is not a hook, it is suggested you put this in settings.php. You can convert the alias into the source, and vice versa.

The FlashVideo module is great, but you may want to embed the video with swfobject, so here's one way to do it.

Of course for this to work you're going to need to include swfobject.js in your template. How you do that depends on your theme and is a little beyond the scope of this article.