http://www.appnovation.com/10-must-have-drupal-modules
10 Must Have Drupal Modules
Thu, Sep 10, 2009 by EricoVinicius
Drupal is great with not only its flexibility, but also with how easily it can be customized to your needs by adding a free module from drupal.org. However, it could be overwhelming for beginners to find the modules that best fit their needs. Therefore, here is a little help:
The Appnovation Must Have Modules List!
1- Administration Menu
The Administration Menu module is a great time saver! It creates a theme independent CSS-based menu on the top of the page with quick access to the most important administrative tasks.
2- FCKeditor - WYSIWYG HTML editor
Chances are that your client won’t want to be adding html tags to its content. Most people would rather use any sort of visual text editor then adding tags manually. FCKeditor is a great solution for those cases! It replaces Drupal's text areas with a user friendly WYSIWYG HTML editor.
3- Mollom
If you don't like spam and don't want to bother your users with extra clicks then Mollom is probably what you need. Mollom stops spam by checking the message against a series of parameters. If the message or the user is considered suspicious, it will display a captcha. Mollom is a great way to not get spammed and not bother your real users.
4- Content Construction Kit (CCK)
CCK is probably one of the most famous drupal modules. If you need more than a page, story or blog posts, CCK will allow you to easily create a custom content type.
5- Views
So you created your new content type using CCK and for some reason, it doesn't quite look right. Or you’re just trying to theme a node, but the mark up isn't exactly what you want. Fear not! Views is here to help you!
6- ImageField
A great add-on to CCK is ImageField. It will allow you to add and image upload field to your custom content types.
7- ImageCache
Allowing your users to upload image files will most likely require that you implement some sort of image processing, which will ensure that the server doesn’t get overloaded with high resolution files and that those images adequately fit the pages. ImageCache will help you create that functionality.
8- Pathauto
As a rule of thumb, having id numbers/node on your URL is not very helpful for the users or for SEO purposes. Pathauto allows you to create user and SEO friend aliases to your content.
9- XML Sitemap
It is usually a good SEO practice to send Google, and other search engines, an updated XML Sitemap conforming to the sitemaps.org specifications. If you don't want to do that manually, you can have the process automated by the XML Sitemap Module.
10 - Google Analytics
Easily add the Google Analytics tracking code to your pages with the Google Analytics Module and get all useful stats about the site and your users.