Top 10 Drupal modules for every website

9 Apr 2009

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Drupal is an open source content management system, that let’s you build almost any type of website, from simple blog, artists website, online magazine, eshop, to education, large corporate, nonprofits or government websites. To read more about Drupal go to About section on drupal.org

As a designer and themer I use Drupal almost daily and through my professional life I have made a list of favorite modules that I use on almost every single website that I build. I want to share my top 10 drupal modules with you and call you to action: “What are your top Drupal modules, that you use everyday to build websites and can’t even imagine your Drupal life without them?” Share your opinion in comments, or write your own blog post and link to this post so we all could read your suggestions.

Administration menu

Administration menu module provides a theme-independent administration interface (aka. navigation, back-end) for Drupal. It’s a helper for novice Drupal users coming from other CMS, a real time-saver for Drupal site administrators, and definitely a must for Drupal developers and site builders. The module renders all administrative menu items below ‘administer’ in a clean, attractive and purely CSS-based menu at the top of your website. It contains not only regular menu items - local tasks are also included, giving you extremely fast access to any administrative resource and function your Drupal installation provides.

Drupal exposed! Administering, developing, and working with Drupal has never been that fast, easy and concise.

“Start with” link: documentation and video demo

Content Construction Kit (CCK)

The Content Construction Kit allows you to add custom fields to nodes using a web browser.

Several contributed projects provide additional field types and widgets for CCK:

computed field: lets you add a PHP-driven “computed field” to CCK node types
date: creates an ISO or unix timestamp date field
email: validated email field
image field: an image field
link: a URL field

“Start with” link: documentation

Views

The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content are presented.

You need Views if:

You like the default front page view, but you find you want to sort it differently.
You like the default taxonomy/term view, but you find you want to sort it differently; for example, alphabetically.
You like the idea of the ‘article’ module, but it doesn’t display articles the way you like.
You want a way to display a block with the 5 most recent posts of some particular type.
You want to provide ‘unread forum posts’.
You want a monthly archive similar to the typical Movable Type/Wordpress archives that displays a link to the in the form of “Month, YYYY (X)” where X is the number of posts that month, and displays them in a block. The links lead to a simple list of posts for that month.

Views can do a lot more than that, but those are some of the obvious uses of Views.

“Start with” link: documentation

Panels

This module allows you to create pages that are divided into areas of the page. It is a completely flexible system that includes a couple of 2 column and 3 column layouts by default, but is also highly extensible and other layouts can be plugged in with a little HTML and CSS knowledge, with just enough PHP knowledge to be able to edit an include file without breaking it.

Perhaps most importantly, it requires no fiddling with PHP code to include the things you want; the interface lets you add blocks, nodes and custom content just by selecting and clicking.

“Start with” link: documentation

ImageCache

ImageCache allows you to setup presets for image processing. If an ImageCache derivative doesn’t exist the web server’s rewrite rules will pass the request to Drupal which in turn hands it off to ImageCache to dynamically generate the file.

“Start with” link: documentation

Pathauto

The Pathauto module automatically generates path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, categories, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows you to get aliases like /category/my-node-title.html instead of /node/123. The aliases are based upon a “pattern” system which the administrator can control.

“Start with” link: documentation

SEO Checklist

This module provides a checklist of good “SEO” actions that you should take to maximize the presence of your Drupal website in the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live, etc. It provides a checklist that helps you keep track of what needs to be done. First, it will look to see what modules you already have installed. Then, all you have to do is go down the list of unchecked items and do them. When all the items are checked, you’re done!

“Start with” link: creator’s podcast

Devel

A suite of modules containing fun for both module and theme developers:

Devel - print a summary of all database queries for each page request at the bottom of each page

Theme developer - Firebug for Drupal themeing.

Generate content - Accelerate development of your site or module by quickly generating nodes, comments, terms, users, and more.

Node Access Summary - View the node access entries for the node(s) that are shown on a page.

Performance Logging - View and log performance statistics for a site, such as page generation times, and memory usage, for each page load.

“Start with” link: documentation

Lightbox2

The Lightbox2 module is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on most modern browsers. The module places images above your current page, not within. This frees you from the constraints of the layout, particularly column widths. It keeps users on the same page. Clicking to view an image and then having to click the back button to return to your site is bad for continuity (and no fun!).

Features: Image Sets, Slideshow Capability, HTML andVideo Content Support, Visual Effects, Keyboard Shortcuts, Zoom Capability, Choice of Layouts, Skin and Animation Configuration, Automatic Image Detection…

“Start with” link: documentation

SWF Tools

SWF Tools allows you to easily embed flash content on your pages using filter syntax. The module consists of a number of components that you can choose to install. For example, you can choose a variety of embedding methods, such as direct embedding markup, or SWF Object 2 JavaScript. You can also enable support for a number of common media players, such as Wijering Player or FlowPlayer. When you enable those you can easily add video and audio content to your site simply by writing <swf file="myAudio.mp3"> or <swf file="myVideo.flv">. SWF Tools will take of everything to create your player. SWF Tools also supports playlists and RTPM streaming.

“Start with” link: documetation

Disclaimer: modules description were taken from project page on drupal.org and updated.

CALL to ACTION: What are your top Drupal modules, that you use everyday to build websites and can’t even imagine your Drupal life without them? Share your opinion in comments, or write your own blog post and link to this post so we all could read your suggestions.