Steve Purkiss's picture

Top 10 Essential Drupal 7 modules

Drupal 7 is nearly here! There's lots of modules included over and above what was in version 6, however for me there are some essential Drupal 7 modules I can't do without on any site I build for clients so I thought I would share them.

Although Drupal 7 is still in beta I'm sure there's many people like me who like to play with cutting-edge technology, but heed this WARNING: Lots of things will still be broken, so be prepared!

1. Token

Although the core of token's functionality is included in Drupal 7 core, the UI and some other bits aren't, so you'll still want to download it.

2. Pathauto

Want nice SEO-friendly URLs automatically created for you? You'll be needing this module then!

3. Mollom

No-one likes spam, especially Mollom, so download it and protect your site!

4. Google Analytics

Know what's going on with your site visitors, download, install and connect to Google Analytics to find out!

5. WYSIWYG

Yup, you'll still need to download a WYSIWYG editor if you want to easily enter content into your Drupal 7 site

6. Views (requires Ctools)

Want more than the 'River of News' display? Then you'll want views so you can build your own SQL queries easily in the Views UI

7. XMLsitemap

Make sure the search engines know your site well, install this!

8. Backup/Migrate

Don't lose everything, backup regularly!

9. Global Redirect

So you've got your nice SEO URLs, but Drupal still allows access from node/1 etc., this module redirects to your nice new ones! (at time of writing I'm getting lots of issues with this but the -dev version worked, YMMV!)

10. Page Title

Allows you to set the title which appears in the browser title bar for extra SEO goodness

Happy Drupaling!

Comments

Submitted by PAnonymous (not verified) on

Very useful info! Thanks! Noobs like me are not sure which modules to start with. Now after D7 is in the wild for some time, do you have some update for this list?

Steve Purkiss's picture

Thanks for the reply - reminds me I must set it up so it sends me emails when people comment!I'm just working on a Drupal 7 project at the moment and am discovering lots of lovely new stuff so will have a think and post an update.

Submitted by JessiJoann (not verified) on

This is very useful for me :) I'm a highschool student in a web design class thats working with Drupal 7 and most of us have no clue! Now I do have one question...What would be the best module for images to be shown in Drupal 7?

Submitted by JessiJoann's friend (not verified) on

You got it! The module would be ... hmnn...IMAGE module ; )

Very useful info! Thanks! Noobs like me are not sure which modules to start with. Now after D7 is in the wild for some time, do you have some update for this list?

Steve Purkiss's picture

Sometime soon, when I get my writing mojo back... ;)