Beginning Drupal

12 Top Drupal Modules

I have two exciting new projects in the pipeline, one a site for a mew magazine, the other enables artists to easily create an online portfolio.

What is doubly exciting is that I will be using the Open Source Drupal CMS for both projects. Drupal is on a par with the Joomla! CMS, with a huge community and a vast raft of modules that extend its capabilities.

I've tapped in to the vast Drupal knowledge of 'karmic' danbuntu, and he's provided me with a beginners list of must-have modules:

"Unmissable" modules

• Admin: Improves the Drupal 6 admin interface so that it looks akin to the slickness that is Joomla!
• Views: A flexible way to present lists and tables of content.
• CCK: Content Creation Kit enables Drupal builders to create custom content fields for editors to add content.

Content modules

• OpenWYSIWYG: A text editor for creating text content.
• IMCE: Insert images easily into text content and manage files. (I think it's short for Image Moxiecode Content Editor).
• Node Gallery: Ability to create flexible individual galleries.
• Markdown: lightweight markup language incorporated into Drupal.

Admin modules

• Drush: command line tool for range of Drupal admin tasks.
• Network Manager: Manage large number of sites from one Drupal site.
• Aegir: Simple Drupal based hosting front end for your entire network of sites.
• Throttle: Congestion control for that slashdot effect.
• Boost: Static page caching to speed up the most requested pages.