Peter Törnstrand

Drupal is a great CMS, during the time I have spent working with it I have come to love it. However, for an emerging Drupal developer the abundance of different modules can be a real hassel. Sometimes you need third party modules to perform simple tasks, such as getting the breadcrumb trail to work properly or to display a simple menu. Below you will find a list of modules I find indespensable when developing a Drupal web site. I have left out the modules Views and CCK since they are so vital to developing a Drupal site you are probably already using them.

Administration

Admin
Perhapse the mose confusing part when first starting to work with Drupal is the lack of a proper administration section. The “back end” of the web site in Drupal is an integrated part of the site itself. This probably has to do with Drupals history as a community system where all users were able to create content. This is however not the case, for the most parts, when I develop sites.

The module simply named Admin solves this problem and does it beautifully. Admin is developed as part of the new administration interface in Drupal 7. The module rearranges the default Drupal navigation menu and makes it more logical for administrators and also ships with a custom administation theme that makes the admin section of your web site look beautiful as well.

Administration theme
Administration theme is a module allowing you to use your selected administration theme on any page. Good for among other things to get the batch processing pages to display with the administration theme.

Better formats
Better formats adds more flexibility to Drupal’s core input format system. It allows you to set default formats for different user roles and is pretty much a must have if you have more then one administrator/editor on your site.

Trash
This module adds a trashcan for nodes. Nodes can be moved to the trash instead of being deleted and thus can be restored or permanently deleted later on.

Menus, breadcrumbs and taxonomy

Menu block
Menu block if a module for creating blocks displaying only parts of a specific menu. Say you want to display a menu only containing level 2+, then this module is for you.

Menu breadcrumbs
By default, Drupal 6 will use the built in Navigation menu for the breadcrumb. This module allows you to use the menu the current page belongs to for the breadcrumb.

Taxonomy breadcrumb
The Taxonomy breadcrumb module generates taxonomy based breadcrumbs on node pages and taxonomy/term pages.

Taxonomy force all
This module forces the paramter all to the taxonomy listing pages. This corrects the problem of empty pages when using hierarchical taxonomy terms.

Editing and file management

Wysiwyg API
Wysiwyg API module allows you to use client-side editors (a.k.a. WYSIWYG editors) to edit content in Drupal. It integrates your editor of choice (well, almost) with Drupal. Personally I almost always use TinyMCE, a free editor by Moxiecode.

IMCE
IMCE is an image/file uploader and browser that supports personal directories and quota. It’s not the prettiest module out there but it gets the job done. This module can also be integrated with client-side editors to allow for a more intuitive image selection tool when creating or editing HTML content.

I use this module as a file manager and with a bit of tweaking you can get this module to integrate visually with the Admin module.

ImageCache
ImageCache allows you to setup presets for image processing. If an ImageCache derivative doesn’t exist the web server’s rewrite rules will pass the request to Drupal which in turn hands it off to ImageCache to dynamically generate the file.

This is a must have module if you are using a lot of images in your content. It takes one image uploaded by the content creator and transforms it to exactly fit the desired dimensions.

Utility

Google Analytics
Adds the Google Analytics web statistics tracking system to your website. Supports tracking of logged in users and outgoing links.

Backup and Migrate
Backup and Migrate simplifies the task of backing up and restoring your Drupal database or copying your database from one Drupal site to another. It supports gzip, bzip and zip compression as well as automatic scheduled backups.