Drupal Modules I'm Using

Submitted by Ryan on Tue, 11/17/2009 - 03:53

A common thing for Drupal bloggers to do is to list the modules they are using on the their site. I love reading such lists. It's a simple thing to do, yet it's a huge contribution to the Drupal community. Drupal currently has thousands of modules available, some good and some not so much. It's tough for someone new to Drupal to decide which modules to use.

I once heard someone say that you should never let people know what modules you are using because it would help hackers find vulnerabilities. Whatever.

I'm sure I'll be adding and subtracting modules from this list through the lifespan of this site. Nonetheless, I hope a few people find this list helpful.

Core

Contact - For the my contact form.
Menu - The magic behind Drupal's menu system
Path - So you can rewrite the page url's so they're more human friendly.
Search - The core Drupal search. Not the greatest, but good enough for now at least.
Taxonomy - To categorize and tag content.
Update Status - Let's you know if your Drupal installation and modules are out of date. It's important to keep up with security updates.

Should Be Core (And most will be in D7)

CCK - One of Drupal's big strengths is that you can customize content types to include all sorts of additional fields.
FileField - For uploading files to the site. I'll be using this to upload my images, videos and audio files.
ImageField - To add image fields to my posts.
Views - This is what we use to make all sorts of listings of content from the homepage blog listing, to many of the sidebar and footer blocks.
ImageAPI - You'll need this to do any image handling.
ImageCache - Allows you to set standard images sizes by cropping and scaling (and other cool things) them automagically.
Vertical Tabs - Small but profound UI improvement to the content edit forms.
Token - A way to use little bits of text as placeholders. Just get it, trust me, you'll need it and like it.

SEO Stuff

I won't say much about these because I find SEO, while still very important and necessary, boring and overstated. But that's just me past midnight. I might feel differently later.

Other Stuff

Administration Menu - Gives you a drop down menu so you can get to the administration page you need much quicker than clicking through the default menu links.
Advanced Taxonomy Blocks - I could have done this with Views but I was lazy. This module powers the 'Categories' block in my right sidebar and tally's the node count. It will also do a nice expand and collapse if you have parent and child terms.
Tagadelic - For the tag cloud we all know and adore.
Amazon - It will become clear soon enough that I love reading books. I plan on doing a lot of book reviews and recommendations. This module does some cool things with the Amazon API.
ShareThis - This is the oh so popular link at the bottom of the posts which popup a window to share the post on a whole whack load of social media sites.
Disqus - I'm trying out the Disqus comment system and am quite happy with it so far. It replaces the core comment modules. I plan on writing a more detailed post about this soon.
Mollom - Disqus handles the comment spam built in with Akismet but I use Mollom for the contact form.
Insert - A nice way to get images (or any other file) into a textarea after uploading it with filefield.
Pathauto - Instead of having to name the url for every post and page I create, this module will do it for me automatically based on pretty fined grained criteria.
TweetMeme - This is the icon I put in the upper right so people can (hopefully) tweet about my posts. It also tracks how many times a post is mentioned in the twitterverse.
Print - Adds the printer friendly and email links to the bottom of the posts. It'll do pdf's too.
Collapsiblock - I use this to make my sidebar blocks expand and collapse when you click it's heading.
JS Tools - Dependency of Collapsiblock

I'm currently not using a rich text editor on this site. I'm not a big fan of those and find them limiting. I'm happy to code HTML in all my text areas. However on client sites I usually use the WYSIWYG API with FCKEditor.

And there you have it.