My Top 10 Essential Drupal Modules
When you first dive into the Drupal CMS the sheer number of modules available can be daunting. I’ve been developing sites using Drupal for three years now and there’s some modules I use on every site, so I thought I’d share a little knowledge and pass the goodies on.
The most recent site I developed was projectstars which uses over 120 so coming up with a shortlist of ten was not easy, but it’s a start for anyone thinking of diving in to the Drupal sea or even just dipping their toes in. Come on in, the water’s fine….!
1. Drupal Administration Menu
I can’t even imagine using Drupal without the Drupal Administration Menu module - it provides a CSS-menu at the top of the screen when you’re logged in as admin so you can easily get to *any* section or subsection of the administration instead of clicking through menus. Rock on!
2. Poormanscron
There’s some housekeeping Drupal needs to do every so often, and the Drupal Poormanscron module makes life easy by doing the job without having to mess with server settings. It’s better of course to do it the ‘official’ way, but for those who don’t want to or don’t have access, this’ll do 
3. Update status
Integrated in Drupal 6, the Drupal Update status module module alerts you automatically when there’s updates available for the modules you have.
4. LoginToboggan
The Drupal LoginToboggan module vastly improves the basic Drupal login features and makes it nice, easy, and a whole lot more configurable.
5. OpenID
Integrated in Drupal 6, the Drupal OpenID module simply provides the ability to login with your OpenID. Do the world a favour and enable OpenID on your website and help banish the thousands of different logins!
6. Persistent Login
The Drupal Persistent Login module provides that all important ‘remember me’ checkbox by the login so you don’t have to keep logging in to a site you use frequently.
Note that I do have some problems with it on the projectstars site as it accrues persistent logins, but the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. The problem occurs when people try to edit their account details and they get an access denied. I’ve posted an FAQ on the site so they know to go to their profile page and just click the ‘erase persistent logins’ link, then it works.
7. CAPTCHA
The Drupal CAPTCHA module provides challenge-response tests so you can improve the chances that a human is registering/logging in to your site rather than a nasty spambot. It’s the minimum amount of protection you need, or soon you will wake up to thousands of spams. Still, it doesn’t stop the human spammers, as you can see on the current version of my open4.org website!
8. Admin Role
The Drupal Admin Role module makes it easy to have a ‘role’ for site admins. It’s extremely useful when there’s more than one of you administering the site so you can log in under your own username to do admin stuff which, so you can see who made the mistakes better lol
9. Views
The list so far has been all admin-focused modules, so I thought there should be at least one ‘functionality’ module here. The Drupal Views module, simply put, allows you to view your data in different ways - like latest posts, posts of a particular category, etc. It allows you to create views by pointing and clicking instead of having to code anything.
10. Gravatar
Finally, I recommend installing the Drupal Gravatar module. A Gravatar is a ‘Globally Recognized Avatar’ and it enables you and your members to link to the avatar of their choice.
It’s run by the guys who created WordPress, the software which this blog uses. Although not absolutely essential, as we move more to a more loosely-joined web, the more you can integrate into these external services the better.
Final words
So there’s my list. I’m sure others will have other ideas, so do please feel free to add a comment with yours! The ones I chose were specifically generic for any type of site - there’s obviously essential modules for particular types of sites - community, multimedia, etc. so I’ll save those for another day when I feel like posting a Top 10 list
Enjoy.
