Drupal 7

Sometimes you need to alter the title that appears on the page and or the title tag in Drupal 7. If you need to make them both the same, a call to drupal_set_title() from within a hook_preprocess_page() will do it.

An alternative to field_get_items() and field_view_value() two-step as a method of retrieving field values,
Entity metadatawrapper seems to be an interesting a useable method of getting what you need out of the node.
https://www.deeson.co.uk/labs/programatically-access-field-data-using-en...

This screen share walks you through why you might want a more powerful way of making blocks and why Codit: Blocks is a good candidate if you need lots of custom blocks.

This is a short screencast showing the basic concept of Codit and Codit: Local and where to place them in a Drupal site.

Blocks within Drupal 7 is a powerful  method of displaying supporting content on Drupal sites.  Blocks can be simple output with just series of links or can contain highly processed information, or partial content of a node.

There are several modules that support the creation of blocks.  They are each quite different.  Here is a comparison of the major features of each to help you decide.

Sometimes you need to debug something on the live server. It should generally be avoided, but sometimes you have no other choice. When you are stuck, Codit can be a lifesaver with codit_debug();

Codit allows you to create a debug slug that when passed in the query string, grants access to whatever output is triggered.

Sometimes you don't want email sent from development environment, and sometimes you want to see what would be sent.
Project Maillog does a nice job of saving all email sent to the db and provides an interface for viewing them. It also lets you turn actual sending off, so that you are not actually sending out email.
https://drupal.org/project/maillog

This article really does a great job teaching the concepts:
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/article/beginners-guide-caching-data-drupal-7
https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes!bootstrap.inc/function/drupal...

The code snippet excerpts

Here is an example of a basic rendering with content and a link

To install a Drupal site into a specific directory, this process works nicely with drush: