I've long been a fan of the Drupal software. From an end user's perspective it's clean and easy to use as content management systems go. Recently, a project cropped up that needed a content management system and I decided to go with Drupal. It's been an interesting learning curve.

Drupal is open source and the user community is large, so help is only a forum post away. Yet there are several areas that seem to be harder than necessary.

For instance, I wanted to add inline adsense to my articles. The forums at the Drupal site weren't very helpful for someone who is new to the scene. I guess if you're a PHP and CSS whiz all you have to do is just do it. But, alas, I am not. Sure, I know enough to hack around, but get me ten lines out and I am lost.

I did come across this page that shows how to add adsense code to Drupal. The last part tells you how to place the code inline, but when you do that you get the code to show on ALL your pages, not just the content pages.

The next step was to post a message in the forums asking for help with Drupal templating. I received the pretty stock answer of looking at the manual, so I did. From what I could decipher there is code for not showing adsense on the front page, which worked well. But it shows everywhere else including the admin screen. Whoops.

So, this Drupal newbie continues to tweak and adjust looking for just the right mix of PHP and CSS to make it happen.