Drupal modules you shouldn't be without

Out of the box Drupal has some pretty powerful content management tools, but installing the best Drupal Modules just makes it the best solution for website design and management. If you are new to Drupal this list has some of the best modules for adding custom fields, administration, functionality, seo and more.

Absolute 'Must Haves'

Three modules no Drupal installation should be without and three that most other Drupal modules worth installing integrate with.

Content Construction Kit (CCK) - The CCK module allows you to add and customise content types (eg. blogs, projects, case studies etc) and add fields to them. Fields can be text, images, video and more. Once defined you can customise how these fields are displayed. This module is so important in Drupal 7 it will be part of Drupal's core. 

Views - The Views module provides an easy to use way of taking content, eg fields, users or the system and building a custom display, eg blocks, RSS feeds or pages. For an example of what Views can do, our projects page is created using Views and CCK.

Panels - The Panels module allows the creation of customised layouts. Using a drag and drop content manager you can create different columned layouts with nodes, blocks and views as content. It can override pages like the Creative Hub homepage to put content wherever the site owner desires.

Administration

By default Drupal uses the website theme for administration which can prove a little frustrating. Thankfully this will change in Drupal 7 as has a new admin them included. In the mean time these modules make managing you website easy.

Admin Menu - Sticky menu that stays at the top of your website putting access to your website's content and settings in an easy to use series of drop down menus.

Root Candy Admin Theme - An theme specifically designed for administration.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Pathauto - Create search engine friendly URLs from data taken from a piece of your content. This could be the title of the blog article, or data such as the blog author or website section can be added as prefixes. So http://www.creativehubuk.com/node/40/ becomes http://www.creativehubuk.com/blogs/looking-out-great-web-design-company.

Global Redirect - As the above module will essentially create two pages with the same content this may get you penalised by Google for duplicate content. This module forces the URL to the correct alias and uses a 301 redirect to make it search engine friendly. So if you do go to http://www.creativehubuk.com/node/40/ you will be redirected to http://www.creativehubuk.com/blogs/looking-out-great-web-design-company.

Nodewords - Edit meta tags for your Drupal pages. It also comes with meta tags for registering your website with Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Center, and Yahoo's webmaster tools.

Page Title - Create meta title tags and alternative <h1> tags for your pages.

XML Sitemap - Automatically creates an XML sitemap to help search engines crawl your website more intelligently. The created sitemap can also be automatically submitted to all major search engines.

Google Analytics - adds the tracking code to integrate your website with Google Analytics

WYSIWYG Editor

FCKEditor - A WYSIWYG editor makes it easy for your content creators and our favourite is FCKEditor. Though with the launch of CKEditor imminent we are looking forward to an update to this module and all the new features of CKEditor.

Images & Video

ImageAPI & ImageCache - ImageAPI is moving to Drupal Core in version 7 but for now it is used as the base for ImageCache allowing support for GD2 and ImageMagick. ImageCache provides tools to setup presets for automatic scaling, resizing, cropping and much more.

ImageField - An extension to CCK and Views, ImageField provides an upload field to content types.  The field can use ImageCache presets to resize images when they are displayed.

Lightbox2 - Overlays images above the current page. Integrates well with CCK and Views.

Forms

Webform - Create custom forms for questionnaires, contact details, or testimonials and make them into pages or blocks for use on your site. The data is stored in the database and emailed to the desired recipients.

Mapping

Location - The Location module allows real-world geographic locations to be associated with Drupal content.

GMap - The GMap module allows you to add Google Maps to your Drupal content.

Developers

Devel - A whole host of tools for developers and themers. Create test content, output theme variables, output data for performance tuning and much more.

Backup & Migrate - Makes it easy to move your Drupal website from your development to live server.

And finally

We are always looking for better modules to integrate into our web design packages. If you have a module you think we should be using leave a comment below.