Drupal 7

Here I am building out a content type for a new project again. I've got to decide whether to use a Option List field or a Taxonomy field. It's an easy choice right? Right? Once you think far enough down a site roadmap, you'll discover it rarely becomes a simple answer. I've read many articles on the subject and nothing I've found seems to cover all details. That being said, if you find any details or related links I've missed be sure to let me know in the comments.

The Node, Views and Panels modules can (and should!) handle most pages you need on a site, but sometimes you need complete control of a "hard coded" content area. You could create a new Page node with a Full HTML text format. Instead, how about putting the whole thing in code? Your work will be in version control and much more straightforward to maintain. Imagine editing HTML in a text editor rather than in the Drupal admin! So much better.

Creating nodes via the UI in Drupal is easy, creating or updating them programmatically(in code) has always been a tedious. I've nearly lost my mind staring into the depths of a dpm($node);

The problem was the lack of straightforward API to handle the field level CRUD. You had to manually shove correctly formatted data into an object, often by comparing against an existing node's array. The correct old process went(and still can if you want!) like this:

Update: Dave Reid just added basic field token support to Token. Try the beta4 of Token (http://drupal.org/project/token) before Entity Tokens. I worked out what needed to happen a few weeks ago, and finally wrote it up. I didn't realize there was an update the Token when I posted. Haha! Internet moves quick!