I work with the open source content management system Drupal on a daily basis, I've designed sites for local and international organisations. Modules are essential for my work, these are the ones I work with everyday and use in some fashion on almost every website.
1. CCK - Content Construction Kit
Almost every website will need to define content fields in some way so that it is easy for the user to enter data and to report off, the CCK module gives you this flexibility to do this. These can be anything from simple number and text fields to select boxes, radio buttons and image upload fields. CCK is one of the main reasons Drupal is a flexible platform allowing for the quick development of website.
More:www.drupal.org/project/cck
2. Views
Being able to store all your data is great however what really matters is how you display this data to the end user. By being able to select what fields you want to display, pass arguments and setup filters, Views is incredibly powerful and goes hand in hand with CCK.
More: www.drupal.org/project/views
3. Panels
Panels is a great way to mix different views and blocks into the same page in different columns. The panels module comes with either two or three column layouts giving some great flexibiltiy to page design.
More: www.drupal.org/project/panels
4. Pathauto
Clean URL's are a great way to give a more descriptive URL, the path auto module allows you to automatically generate different urls for different types of content. For example on ImAFish it differentiates imafish.co.uk/blog/??? and imafish.co.uk/articles/??? .
More: www.drupal.org/project/pathauto
5. TinyMCE
TinyMCE integrates a Javascript WYSIWYG editor into Drupal providing an easy way to add formatting to pages. It doesn't matter about the type of site I'm building, the client always needs a way to easily edit a pages content. TinyMCE makes this goal possible, I don't think there has been a Drupal site to date where I haven't integrated TinyMCE in.
More: www.drupal.org/project/tinymce
6. IMCE
IMCE integrates an image upload box into TinyMCE and provides basic controls for resizing images. IMCE is here for a similar reason that TinyMCE is, people love to put pictures on web pages and usually these start out on a users computer. IMCE provides an easy way to upload these images so that they can be positioned on a page with TinyMCE.
Comments
Good selection of essential
Good selection of essential Drupal mods Pete.We've just released modules for our 3 image zooming tools. They're free for non-commercial use, or a small fee for commercial sites. As a result, we can't include them on drupal.org. I'd be pleased to hear what you think of them . Here is the module page for Magic Zoom http://www.magictoolbox.com/magiczoom_drupal/ Have a look at Magic Thumb and Magic Magnify too!
Jake, many thanks for the
Jake, many thanks for the comment - I really like your module, its a nice alternative to the lightbox module. Does it integrate with imagecache and the imagefield modules??
I like to thank you for
I like to thank you for providing the list of sites. It helps me a lot.