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.

This list is a tiny fraction of all the module goodness you can find at drupal.org.Do you have any other modules that you can't live without? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Aweera posted on July 27, 2010 2:32 pm

I never use drupal before, always with WordPress. Im going to install Drupal to try it out. hope someone can guide me if i am lost. :D

david carboni posted on June 7, 2010 6:05 am

as my self i rather using wysiwyg html for website owner,cause i have seen drupal have weekness

Mike posted on January 5, 2010 6:32 pm

FCK is the best choice of WYSIWYG but using the WYSIWYG api with FCK is much better.

AJ posted on December 20, 2009 2:11 pm

Thanks for the article. It i just for me. As for me, I'm making my first steps in it. I've found a lot of really nice books about Drupal at the pdf search engine http://pdf.rapid4me.com . Thanks for clearing some points, additional information and new challenge.

Stephen Mercado posted on December 7, 2009 2:13 pm

Mollow is the best of this. It helps me a lot. Pathauto is good one as well. I use them most often.

Freddy posted on September 13, 2009 4:30 pm

Thank you for the list guys. Will definitely use some of these Drupal modules.

Gerard McGarry posted on September 11, 2009 10:16 pm

One comment on the use of pathauto: while it does make for an SEO-friendly URL, with the advent of services like Twitter, using Drupal's node/id format makes a nice short URL that can bypass the need for URL shortening tools. Just a thought.

Tommy posted on September 11, 2009 4:01 pm

Is there a way to change this info and add some more languages? I most definitely do not consider myself English and I would be happy to help in German too. I am sure other members feel the same.

Drupal Theme Garden posted on September 11, 2009 9:22 am

Nice list, I would just add Nodewords module (allows you to set some meta tags for each node, view or panels page):
http://drupal.org/project/nodewords

Vegard posted on September 11, 2009 8:17 am

I agree with Florian on the WYSIWYG, and for my part the admin module has taken over from admin menu. And yes, strange description of views :)

Florian posted on September 11, 2009 6:55 am

Good list.

Rather than using the fckeditor module directly, it's better to use the wysiwyg api (http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg) with the fckeditor library. Among other things, it gives you a much better selection of what textareas should have a wysiwyg editor and which ones shouldn't.

Les posted on September 11, 2009 5:42 am

Nothing new here, but nothing disagreeable, either. I am completely baffled by your description of Views, however.

Erik posted on September 11, 2009 1:27 am

Excellent list, I use almost all of these. ;)

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