I began running this website on Drupal 6 shortly after the official release. Before then, I periodically installed development versions of Drupal 6 on the production server during the weekends so others could judge the progress that was being made. During this period, I made the claim that I didn't really need any contributed modules to run my site on Drupal 6.
As I said last week, it's amazing how many people overlook the power of Drupal...even without its contributed modules. Yes, I'll be glad when the Views, Panels, and even the TinyMCE contributed modules are ready to use with Drupal 6. But I've always looked at contributed modules as modules of convenience and not necessity.
It could have been a bold statement that I made at the beginning of the year. Although Drupal 6 interest has finally overtaken Drupal 5, there still are a number of popular modules still under the designation of release candidate, beta, and even alpha. My site has shown that you don't have to always wait for contributed modules to upgrade a site to the latest version of Drupal. However, my statement was a lie. By the time Earl Miles released Views 2.0 Beta 1, I found I didn't want to live without my essential modules for very long.
The following are a list of contributed Drupal modules that I wouldn't want to do without here at CMSReport.com. I am neither the first word nor the last word of which modules you should be running for your Drupal site. In fact, by coincidence, Kathleen Murtagh has just written a similar list of contributed modules that should be considered. Some of the modules on my list are still going through their development phase and you'll have to assess the risk of using the modules on your own sites. Personally, I like to take the risk for my hobby sites such as these, but I am more cautious when using development code for sites managed at my day job. Whichever modules you choose, be sure to thank the developers that have made your site possible.
Contributed modules used at CMSReport.com
Sends e-mail to notify both registered and anonymous users about new comments on pages where they have commented. The goal is to drive one-time users that comment back to you site to convert them to real registered users. This conversion step is an essential one in building a blog comment community.
FeedAPI aggregates feeds on a Drupal website by generating light weight items or nodes from feeds. It provides a straightforward configuration for most use cases and is extensible through an API. FeedAPI integrates with OG (but does not require it).
This module allows users with proper permissions to upload images into Drupal. Thumbnails and additional sizes are created automatically.
Images could be posted individually to the front page, included in stories or grouped in galleries.
Mollom helps you stop comment spam, contact form spam, forum spam, fake user accounts, etc. To do so, Mollom combines context analysis and accessible CAPTCHAs to optimize your site's accessibility and experience.
The web is changing. User contribution is now what makes or breaks a site. Allowing users to react, participate and contribute while still keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, website spam. When moderation becomes easier, you have more time and energy to interact with your web community.
This module allows you to specify a redirect from one path to another path or external URL, using any HTTP redirect status.
Pathauto version 2.0 and later can be configured to automatically generate path redirects to ensure that URL alias changes do not break existing links.
The Pathauto 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.
This module provides an powerful interface for managing a taxonomy vocabulary. A vocabulary gets displayed in a dynamic tree view, where parent terms can be expanded to list their nested child terms or can be collapsed.
The views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists of content (nodes in Views 1, almost anything in Views 2) are presented. Traditionally, Drupal has hard-coded most of this, particularly in how taxonomy and tracker lists are formatted.
This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. It has four modes, plus a special mode, and provides an impressive amount of functionality from these modes.
The Wysiwyg project is a central development space for multiple efforts, which have the following goals:
Overall goal: Abstract the configuration and integration for any client-side editor in one module, and allow Drupal modules to interact with any client-side editor.
XML Sitemap automatically creates a site map that conforms to the sitemaps.org specification. This helps search engines keep their search results up to date. XML Sitemap replaces the Google Sitemap module written by Matthew Loar as part of Google Summer of Code 2005. Please check there for older versions.