Okay, enough complaining about Drupal's steep learning curve. How about some good news for a change?

Drupal modules.

Drupal may be the Second Coming of Sliced Bread, but all the available Drupal modules are the actual nutrients that feed a Drupal website, sustain it, allow it to grow, give it new abilities. There are over five hundred to choose from -- that's more than all the Pokémon in the world! ;-) Indeed, if it weren't for the memory footprint and performance drag that would obtain with the installation and/or enablement of so many modules, I'd be tempted to collect as many as I could!

As a new Drupal user, I cannot comment on elegant code, extensibility, and other "meta-technical" matters. What I can say from my worm's-eye-view of things is that Drupal modules are, if you'll pardon my French, the big nice "T&A" of Drupal web development. For it turns out that the Drupal "whole" is best approached through its "parts." I'd thought of Drupal as the horse and its modules as the cart, but, at least pedagogically speaking, it's the modules that comprise the horse and Drupal is but the horseshoes!

I know that sounds contradictory -- it certainly is in opposition to how official Drupal documentation presents the matter -- but in practice you will, at least as a newbie (that is, a non-programming and barely skriptin' newbie) for some months going forward, deal with the modules more than with Drupal itself, the Drupal core (so-called). From a practical POV, it's the modules that comprise Drupal, that lay at the heart of the Drupal experience, despite being classified as extensions of Drupal on an organizational chart and therefore seeming somehow secondary. It's rather like the phrase "all politics is local," and in a very real sense you won't know Drupal unless you know its modules. This isn't to disparage the great work and vision of the volunteer Drupal development team; it's simply to say, again, that newbies (as defined just above), at least, will spend much more time on "module matters" than anything else.

Thus the key to understanding Drupal, for a newbie, is to really work with its modules.

In addition to the Tribune, Mibbit, Blockquote, CAPTCHA, and reCAPTCHA modules, I've now implemented Account Reminder, Add to Any, Bad Behavior, BlockAnonymousLinks, Conditions, Countdown, Counter, Email Change Confirmation, FAQ, Global Redirect, Lightbox 2, MultiBlock, Quotes, PageEar, Re: Comment, Scheduler, Search Ranking, Simple Ad Block, Tagadelic, Terms of Use, and WordPress Comments. I also have my eye on the possible addition of Automated Logout, Avatar Selection, Banner Rotor, Blog Reactions, Blog Theme, Bookmark Us, Brilliant Gallery, Buy Me A Beer, CacheExclude, Classified Ads, Clickpath, Comment Subscribe, CSS Injector, ecard, Front Page, Gravatar, Iconizer, Ignore User, Kudos, Language Sections, Login Destination, membership, Mollom, Node Translation, Organic Groups, PHPIDS, Pirate, Please Register, Search 404, ShoppingAds, Shoutbox, Similar Entries, Slideshow Creator, SpamSpan Filter, Sphere, Splash, Switchtheme, Text Link Ads Integration, Translatable Comments, Translation Framework, User Activity, Video Filter, Virtual Sites, WhoIs Lookup, Zoomify -- even Christmas Snow (yes, you read that right)! Many more exciting ones, like Abuse, Advertisement, the Adsense module, Advanced Forum, Affiliate, Affinity, Amazon, Buddylist2, Comment Mail, Comment Notify, Dash Media Player, Flag, Flash Video, Forward, Image Watermark, Internationalization, Memetracker, Meta Tags, Module Builder, Page Title, Pathologic, Persistent Login, printer/email/pdf, Popup Dialogs, Privatemsg, Quick Tabs, Quote, Read More Tweak, Recipe, Secure Login, Secure Pages, Session Restore, Share This, Signatures for Forums, SimpleMenu, Simplenews, Site Map, SiteMenu, Smileys, the Spam module, Spam_Tokens, Subscriptions, Theme Generator, Tipjoy, Upside Down, User Points, User Referral, Webmail Plus, Whisper, and Zeitgeist have yet to be (fully) ported into Drupal 6, and should make next year very exciting indeed. (Whew!)

Curiously, a few are not working: Add This Button, FancyZoom, and the Live preview module. This underscores the plug-n-pray aspect of Drupal web development (among other insults, I'd said once that I'm surprised it doesn't say "Microsoft" somewhere!) and the PC-like nature of its extensibility. For just as with PC-compatibles often being incompatible due to all the various possible configurations increasing the likelihood of resource conflicts, so too might not any given Drupal module work well with another because of design oversights between the unacquainted strangers who author the different software.

That's not even to mention all the modules available for strictly development and maintenance purposes which do not affect visitors or users as directly, like Real-Time CSS Editor, Search Engine Referrer, Site Documentation, Site Notes, Statistics Advanced Settings, Subdomain, Super Nav, System Info, URL List, URL Proxy, Usability Testing Suite, XML Sitemap, XML to KML, and Zemanta.

Hence these regular entries on Drupal. When not at the gym, it's all I do, Drupal web development! And for all the pains I've documented, the joys are vastly more numerous. Why, everything on this site that works is a joy and testimony to what goes right with Drupal. The ratio of headaches-to-joy is something on the order of 1:50! That's a phenomenal ROI by any measure, especially considering that Drupal only takes time (and patience, and frequent breaks to the punching bag), because it's all absolutely free!

So Google be damned! My fitness site will continue to document my maturation as a Drupal user and advocate! I can't wait to develop the Drupal competence and even mastery necessary to finally finish up my Drupal for the Courageous! series of how-to articles using this site as a case study.

Hmmm, maybe I should change the WorkoutABC.com motto to "Your A-thru-Z for Fitness, Health, and Personal Training™ -- with a dollop of Drupal!"