10 Useful Drupal Modules Mike Minton

David Herrold asks -  “Mike, I’d be interested in knowing what you think the top 10 Drupal modules are for any site? And why?”.

1. CCK - It slices, dices, and makes gravy.  Well not quite but it does make short work of adding new fielded content into your site.  Stories and Pages can only get you so far so when you to quickly add things like contact forms, surveys, press releases, news stories, multimedia content, and the list goes on - turn to CCK.  My single complaint with CCK is that there does not appear to be away to export Custom Content Type to a file and subsequently deploy to additional environments through a good old fashioned, versioned, file based module.
2. Views - Select fields, filter, sort, and join all through an interface so friendly even a Microsoftie could use it.  The default view tables include sortable headers and can be easily and quickly styled.
3. Pathauto - Allows administrators to set rules for automatic URL paths for new content ensuring good SEO and usability.  If you are still using “/node/11111″ versus “/careers/java-software-engineer” you might want to check out this module.
4. XML Sitemap - Works like you would expect an XML Sitemap module to work - quietly in the background making sure Google and friends are aware of your every update.
5. FCKEditor - One of the most common gripes against Drupal is that it doesn’t even include a WYSIWYG editor by default.  No, but it easy to get FCK Editor or any number of others up and running.  The addition of FCK Editor makes content creation much more approachable for the masses.  I prefer FCK Editor over TinyMCE only by a hair due to having more granularity of control over where the editor appears with FCK.  TinyMCE also had a bug where the image upload button would not show up for quite a while in the early Drupal 6 days. I could not easily solve it and moved back to FCK Editor.
6. TinyMCE - See Above
7. Menu Breadcrumb - Breadcrumbs are a nice usabilty feature but can be a pain to implement.  This module automatically creates and synchronizes breadcrumbs with the menu structure.
8. Apache Solr - Solr is open source search engine built on the Java Lucene framework.  Solr was created by CNet and is used to power the search for the Reviews part of the site.  This Drupal module lets you replace the default Drupal search functionality with a heavy weight search engine.  Useful for large content collections or for the introduction of faceted searching.
9. Metatags - Provides full control over the meta description and keyword tags for extra SEO juice.
10. Devel - Building a site without it is just plain silly.  One of the most powerful tools in the set is the ‘Theme Developer’ tool.  Called Firebug for Drupal Themeing, it allows you to trace every single bit of content from database to final presentation.  Determine which template files or functions were invoked and easily dump the values of all the available variables for further customization.

I suspect that some of the above will be replaced once I have more experience but that is my current short list.  Anyone else have any favorites?

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