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Attention new users: Essential Drupal Modules

heather's picture
Submitted by heather on Wed, 2008-11-19 14:05

In one of the sessions on Saturday, I showed (ripped through very quickly) a site you could make with just Drupal core. Then later on I saw several presenters mention the MUST HAVE modules. There are alot of modules on Drupal.org. So sifting through them can be tough. First off, you should try out the most popular and essential modules. I started a list here.

I'm curious what other modules people consider essential?

Here you can see some stats on Drupal Modules usage: http://drupal.org/project/usage

Also on DrupalModules.com you can see most favorited modules: http://drupalmodules.com/top-favorites

I grouped them by task, and also made BOLD the ones which were super important (in my opinion)

  1. Site maintenance:
    • Drupal Administration Menu - The first module you should install... Stella & Scor showed their installations and how it makes it much easier to pop around to different sections of a site. I always install this now - it is really essential.
    • Devel - Alan referred to this as a way to identify names of files or fields which you can theme with functions or files-based themes
    • CAPTCHA - this helps block spam submissions and bogus user accounts being created.
    • Pathauto & Token - this makes search engine friendly URLs, and you can control a path/structure/ on your site. (pathauto requires token)
  2. Site management and navigation:
  3. Content management:
    • Views - I showed this in the hands on session for how to build a custom block of content.
      • Advanced help - if you use Views, and you're new to it- please install Advanced help! If you have idea for what to include in advanced help for views, please contact me.
    • Content Construction Kit (CCK) - This is how you make custom content types
      • ImageField Stella showed the image related modules in her presentation. This one adds image fields to your custom content types from CCK
    • Image - Stella showed the image related modules in her presentation
    • ImageCache Resizes images on the fly! Yay thumbnails!
    • Date - Scor demonstrated this module for managing date entries
  4. Content creation & editing:
Groups:
Ireland
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I'd use Mollom instead of

stella's picture
stella - Wed, 2008-11-19 14:39

I'd use Mollom instead of Captcha to be honest. I'd also suggest using Filefield for CCK if you want to upload non-image content, e.g. PDFs, etc. Actually in D6, filefield is required by imagefield anyway.

If you want multi-lingual sites, there is the locale module which comes with Drupal core, but you should also get Internationalization (i18n) for translating nodes, menus, etc. As an addition, though not really a must-have, if you want different translations for the same languages in different countries, for example, French Canada and French France, then I would suggest using the Country Code module.


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simpleviews

scor's picture
scor - Wed, 2008-11-19 15:20

On the train on the way back to Galway I realized that we should have mentioned simpleviews while presenting views. It's really good when you are starting with Drupal and want to build really simple views like for instance listing all the blog entries sorted by date. And since it uses the Views API, you can later use Views UI if you need more tweaking. A must for beginners!

I also agree with Stella on Mollom. It's also easier to setup.


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from mrfelton - SEO modules

heather's picture
heather - Sat, 2008-11-22 13:28

I was just browsing about and saw mrfelton's(tom) site with a list of top 5 SEO modules:

5 Drupal SEO modules - essential modules for all sites on his Code Gobbler blog</>

pathauto
globalredirect
xmlsitemap
robotstxt
nodewords

good to know! i use path auto, but i wasn't using globalredirect.


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