This is work related. I'm working on testing out a popular content management system for an interactive web site: Drupal 5.1. It's a reasonably well functioning system, with a rich feature set, and it installs easily.

Among the features is the ability to add a new kind of content. You start out with "Page" and "Story" content types, and can add more using a simple web based interface. So I added the "Document" content type to host file uploads (Drupal already supports allowing file uploads for defined content types). Defining the content type is easy! I can also add a content of a specific type, and even find it in the search function.

However, I now want to create a menu item called "Documents" which lists all file uploads. Should be simple, right?

Wrong.

Drupal comes with no such feature, and searching the online documentation on "filter node type" and other such variants, I'm still nowhere near a solution. Then I find a user-contributed snippet, of how to display all content EXCEPT for a given type -- aha! I'll just change the "<> type" to "= type" and I'm done!

Except the formatting is really bland, so I need to dive in to figure out how to add annotation such as "submitted by ". Most of it was easy to figure out by reading source, but I got stuck for almost an hour on how to properly format a date to the user's preferred format using the Drupal settings (the answer is the 'format_date' function).

The problem really wasn't that it was hard; the problem was that the documentation was pretty sparse, and worse, there was no useful search function. Even a Google search with site:api.drupal.org returned nothing useful and lots of chaff.

Well, that, and I can't believe nobody before me have actually wanted a page that lists contents of a given type that they've just defined.