Ok, so as a follow up to my last two articles on Drupal I thought I would put together one of those silly Top 10 lists of must have contributed modules. I say contributed modules because I think they core modules fall outside of these in that you have to actually download and install them separately and they are generally created and managed by the community at large. I’ll call it a list but in no particular order. I don;t think anyone of these is so much more important than the others and to be honest i don’t feel you can have a great website without using all 10.
CCK and Embedded Media Field are must have modules for quality content development and they are important for building blocks of other modules which use CCK fields throughout the site in almost everything. CCK is becoming a standard for use in module development and is bound someday to be part of core Drupal. Embedded Media Field is a must have for incorporating third party content such as pictures, audio and video files from sites such as Hulu, YouTube, Picasa and Flickr which of course makes for such a nice website.
Views is most likely one of the more important of these modules because it serves the purpose of allowing custom displaying of website content and unique site layouts. Views is important as a base module for many others which incorporate Views code for better site navigation and content distribution.
Tokens work with Triggers to produce Actions which help manage site content and needs. Tokens are used by quite a few other modules and helps webmasters manage site functions and features more easily,
SWF Tools is an all around media whiz suited for adding music, movies and photos to your blog posts. SWFTools turns your website into a full fledge media powerhouse capable of supporting almost any type of media there is.
Chaos Tool Suite is one of those tools that others use to build upon and it doesn’t actually do much on its own but you will find it hard to build a great site without it because so many other great plugins use it as a library of functions.
Date and Calendar are both important for obvious reasons including the site wide Calendar as well as scheduling and other date time related functions. It’s hard to manage a website without a suite of tools like these.
Image, Image Assist and Image Crop offer some features which are actually covered by other modules listed above but these are great for simple sites where you just want your users to add or import images or for anyone looking for total control over image dimensions and properties.
Location module provides geotargeting for users and content allowing you to tag blog posts, images and other content types with GPS locations. Location is great as a stand along module or also used by a number of other great modules like Gmap and User Locations.
Facebook Share or Facebook Social and Twitter are great for content websites who want their members to share content on the webs largest social networks and the number one way for marketing websites beyond the search engines. I add either on the FB modules because sadly the two don’t play well together and you have to chose one over the other. Facebook Share is straight forward and easy to use while Facebook Social is a bit trickier to install but offers much better features. Twitter does a fine job of syndicating your blog posts but it lacks in integration with Drupal login which is such a bummer.
Ok so there are actually more than 10 modules listed here but some go hand in hand with others and should be considered one module for the purposes of this list. You can build a website without any of these but you can’t build a great website without all of them.
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