My favourite Drupal modules and why you should use them

Drupal's power and flexibility really comes into its own when you start using add-on modules to extend its functionality. Finding the really useful modules amongst the hundreds that are available can be a daunting task. To help you sort the wheat from the chaff, I've compiled a list of the sixteen Drupal modules that I use in almost every site I build.

Drupal Administration Menu

The Drupal Administration Menu module converts your administration menu into nicely styled drop down menus that allow easy and immediate access to all menu items. The contents of the drop down menus will automatically adapt to the permissions of the currently logged in user. I love it, my clients think it's cool, and so will you.

Content Construction Kit (CCK)

CCK is a very powerful module that allows you to create custom content types (in Drupal 4.7x -- this is natively supported in 5.x) and lets you add custom fields to them. Text, number, image and file upload, and node reference fields are just a few of an array of possible field types that may be added. In addition to various internally supported field types, CCK can be further extended through add-on modules. See the full list of CCK modules.

AdSense

The Adsense module allows you to manage your Google Adsense ads. It's got options for styling ad boxes and defining your custom channels. It tracks clicks and allows you to set up revenue sharing (for use when you have a blog with multiple contributors, for example). I like it because it automatically hides the ads for me when I'm logged in. Instead, it displays an outline of the ad block, so I can get a good idea of what my design looks like without skewing my Adsense impression count (too many impressions and no clicks apparently lowers the quality of the ads shown and thereby the amount you might get paid for the click).

AdSense Injector

The Adsense Injector modules works really well with the Adsense module mentioned above. It allows you to inject adsense blocks right into your site's content. Magic!

Devel

If you're a Drupal developer, and especially if you're developing bespoke modules, the Devel module is an essential tool. It gives you real insight into what's going on behind the scenes.

FeedBurner

Burn those Drupal feeds, baby! The FeedBurner module integrates some of FeedBurner's services with Drupal. Specifically, it automatically redirects your default Drupal feed to your FeedBurner feed.

Meta tags

The Meta tags module allows you to set some meta tags for each node or view on your site, in order to help along your SEO efforts.

Pathauto

The Pathauto module is part of my essential toolkit and I use it on every site I build. It allows you to define templates for the way paths to pages should be created. So, instead of node/10 the path to the page you're currently viewing has been created from a template defined as <taxonomy-term>/<page-title>. There are myriad options for defining these templates. The one I use most often is the full menu path to the current page, for example: <menu-item>/<child-menu-item>/<page-title>.

Global Redirect

If you're using the Pathuto module, then you should really be using the Global Redirect module too. The pathauto module will create aliases of your normal node paths, which means that you'll have two copies of the page on your site. Rather than taking the chance of having these duplicate pages picked up by the search engines (they'll penalise you for that), the Global Redirect module will automatically redirect queries from the basic node URL to the newly created alias.

Service Links

The Service links module allows you to automatically add links to social bookmarking sites (such as del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit) to your pages. It's got all those neat little icons included too.

Spam

Beat spam comments with the Spam module. It's quite a neat piece of work that relies on some clever methods to detect spammy comments and automatically unpublish them. Unfortunately, this module is all too necessary today.

Views

Views is another module I use all the time. It's so integral to creating most of my sites that I sometimes have to wonder why it isn't part of the Drupal core. But when I consider that the point of Drupal is probably to be a basic framework rather than a do-all CMS, I can understand why it's not there. So what does the Views module do? If you think about it, Drupal already contains some built-in views; the default front page being the most obvious example. The Views module let you override this default front page view so you can mess around with the sorting, for example. Not only that, it lets you create whole new views too. Sample usage? How about a recent news page that lists all the items of that news content type that you've just created? Indispensable. Get it.

Site map

The Site map module lets you create, well, a site map. It lets you configure which of your site's menus you'd like to include and then lists all of the linked pages on the site map page. Useful.

XML Sitemap

The XML Sitemap module lets you create an XML site map that's compatible with Google's Webmaster Tools. This should definitely be part of your SEO toolkit.

TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor

The TinyMCE module provides full integration of the TinyMCE WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor into Drupal. There are configuration options that allow you to easily enable or disable the plug-ins that come with TinyMCE. TinyMCE isn't perfect, but it provides one of the most polished products and it's an essential tool if you're developing websites for technophobic clients. You can set up multiple profiles that you can set up to be used for different user types. This will allow you, for instance, to show the full toolbar for advanced users, and a basic toolbar for restricted or anonymous users.

Link to content

If you're using the TinyMCE module, then the Link to content module is a valuable add-on. It provides three plug-ins that can be added to the TinyMCE toolbar. The plug-ins all come in the form of pop-ups that let you browse the pages of your site and create links to them; there's one to browse all pages, one to browse your site menus, and one to browse categories.

So, I hope you've enjoyed this list and can take something useful from it. Do you have any modules you can't do without? Let me know in the comments!