Let's build a website together.

So, I recently made up a list of some essential modules for Drupal and I thought I might share it with you fine folks.

This list is by no means exhaustive and if you have some more recommendations, please comment. Here goes:

• Pathauto

  This lets clean URLs be automatically generated based on your specifications based on the content type. Useful for keeping things pretty, but tricky to override. Clean URLs and Path module both need to be enabled.

• Google Analytics

  Great because you can choose whether or not you want to track users who are logged in and you can only track certain users, etc.

• Image (+Image Assist & Image Enhanced Scaling)

  Good for creating and managing albums. Pretty much all you need for most sites (as far as photo albums go). Also keeps images organized if users want to upload and insert an image into a page.

• SimpleNews & MimeMail

  This is for newsletters. It keeps track of subscriptions and allows people to subscribe without having to register. You can have multiple newsletters and they are all sent from the admin panel. MimeMail is so that you can send HTML emails.

• FlashVideo

  For uploading and converting video into .flv. The only tricky thing here is that you need to increase the PHP upload limit in the ini file (and set your cron task).

• Content Constructor Kit

  You need this if you want to go beyond just pages or blog posts. When you make a new content type, you can treat it differently for access, pathauto, etc. Very handy and highly customizable. There are also many fields you can download and install to use with any new content type ( i.e. a money field that can convert into different currencies, etc).

• Taxonomy Access Control

  This is used to control access to certain content based on which tags you give the content. It can be handy. But if you want to use it, you should do so from the beginning. Trying to retrofit it is a nightmare. If you try it out, then uninstall, you should go back in and reset permissions or else you will go crazy with access denied errors.

• FCKeditor

  This is just in case you want to give your users a real WYSIWYG. However, you should know that the basic content field converts many things into valid HTML automatically. Such as typing:

            1. First thing
            2. Second thing
  

  would render

            <ol>
            <li>First thing</li>
            <li>Second thing</li>
            </ol>
  

  It's quite a smart cookie to start out with, but some people need the buttons.

• Read More Tweak

  I just found this little module recently. Much closer to what us normal people expect in a quality read more link.