"Must Have" Modules

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In rebuttal to Geshan Manandhar's "must have" list, I propose these modules. I prefer to think of this more as a "must consider" list though.

  1. FAQ - Many sites include a "Frequently Asked Questions" page; this module manages the list for you, so all you have to concentrate on is the content. If you want to add an "Ask the Expert" (or advice) "column." you can add the Faq_Ask module.
  2. Weblinks - Almost every site has a "Links" page; this module manages that and allows you to have user-submitted links. It will even check the links on occasion to see if they still work.
  3. Taxonomy Image - The taxonomy_image module allows site administrators to associate images with taxonomy terms, which can then be displayed in addition to, or instead of, the printed term.
  4. Glossary - This module scans posts for glossary terms (including synonyms). The glossary indicator is inserted after every found term, or the term itself is turned into an indicator depending on the site settings. By hovering over the indicator, users may learn the definition of that term. Clicking the indicator leads the user to that term presented within the whole glossary or directly to the detailed description of the term, if available.
  5. Site Documentation - This module display information from various places within the Drupal environment, saving you time searching through many pages. Some of the information comes from internal arrays, some is derived from system calls, and some comes directly from the database tables.
  6. Event - This is a simple module to keep track of events and show them to users in various calendar displays. It also provides an event API to allow other modules to store and work with date data. There is an Event Repeat module for repeating events. It also works well with several event-related modules (e.g. Sign Up).
  7. Mollom is a new spam fighting effort mainly initiated by Dries (Drupal Project lead) himself. With a central server to see if posts are spam or ham (not spam) it claims a high percent of success. You can get more information on its official website. This replaces the Spam module due to its long-delayed overhaul.
  8. Image Attach - This module is part of the Image package; it allows you to easily attach image nodes to other node types.
  9. Pathauto - This module automatically generates path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, categories, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows you to get aliases like /category/my-node-title.html instead of /node/123. The aliases are based upon a "pattern" system which the administrator can control.
  10. XML Sitemap - This automatically creates a site map that conforms to the sitemaps.org specification. This helps search engines keep their search results up to date.
  11. User registration notification - Notifies the administrator of new user registrations. You can even get emails when someone updates their profile as well.

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Comments

In theory, couldn't one use

In theory, couldn't one use CSS to do the job of Taxonomy Image?

Well...

Yes, and no. If you have the time and energy, yes, you can use CSS to map all terms to images. But not every site allows one to access the CSS. This module does it at the Drupal admin level. It also has several other sub-modules to do other stuff with the images.

My favorite modules

For admins

About This Node<
About This Node creates a block that displays information about the node you're viewing.
Admin block<
The adminblock module enables admins to display a block with the comments approval queue and the node moderation queue.
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.
CAPTCHA<
A CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test most often placed within web forms to determine whether the user is human.
Remove Upload Enclosures<
This module removes the enclosures created by the upload module on RSS feeds.
RobotsTxt<
Use this module when you are running multiple Drupal sites from a single code base (multisite) and you need a different robots.txt file for each one.
Translation Overview<
The Translation Overview page provides a table listing the site's nodes and showing what's been translated into each language.
For users/visitors

Book Search<
Book Search defines a new search tab that lets your users perform simple searches of book content on your site.
BUEditor<
A plain textarea editor aiming to facilitate code writing.
External Links<
External Links is a small module used to differentiate between internal and external links.
Footnotes<
Footnotes module can be used to easily create automatically numbered footnote references into an article or post (such as a reference to a URL).
Lightbox2<
The Lightbox2 module is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It's a snap to setup and works on most modern browsers.
Page Title<
The word "title" is a bit overloaded. Every piece of content in Drupal has a title, and so does every page. The page title is the one found in the HTML head inside the <title>< tag.
Similar Entries<
A module that displays a block with the most similar nodes to the currently viewed one, based on the title and body fields. Related pages show as a list in a block.
Table Alternate Rows<
This input filter inserts even and odd classes into user submitted tables within nodes.
Last but not least Nancy's modules Taxonomy Browser< and Taxonomy List<.

- Thomas

great list

Thanks for posting this. You have given me some great ideas.

Good

Glad it was some help.

I'm not sure if Mollom is a

I'm not sure if Mollom is a must-have, I personally prefer Akismet which seems to be performing much better

Thanks for including my blog's link

Thank you for including my blog's link, you list is also good but I gave a different point of view in my blog post. Anyways keep up the good work.

akismet

Not really sure anything is as good as askimet. I guess its kind of an industry standard now. But always looking forward to try others out when they get a decent review.