Top 10 Drupal 6 Modules

Updated (Jan 1, 2010) - Lullabot updated their Top 40 Drupal Modules for Drupal 6 & 7!

Drupal grows in awesomeness all the time. It's easy to fall for the glam and glitz of certain modules and install them all. But a lot can be achieved with CCK+Views and template.php, without extraneous modules. Remember - less modules means less load on your system, better performance, and easier upgradability.

Let me share my top 10 modules for Drupal 6 (and Drupal 5, for archival purposes).

Top 10 Drupal 6 Modules

Best Drupal 6 Modules

• Pathauto + Token: a must, automatically generates url aliases based on Token
• Views: create customized views of nodes
• Content Construction Kit (CCK): defines new content types with custom fields
• Imagefield + Filefield: defines an image field type
• Imagecache: allows automatic image manipulation, such as resize and crop (extendible to add watermark, rotate, add border, etc.)
• Gmap Module: inserts Google Maps into nodes based on Location fields
• Location (API, module): associates geographic location with content/user
• Google Analytics: adds Google Analytics code to all pages, ability to cache GA code!!!
• Lightbox2: enables Lightbox2 image display, and love Stella!!!
• Devel: new Theme Developer component is all shades of niftiness

More Drupal 6 Modules

Meh, who's counting?

• Automatic Nodetitles: allows hiding of title field and automatic generation of title based on Tokens
• Date: defines date/time CCK field, works well with Automatic Node Title
• TinyMCE: the most popular WYSIWYG editor for advanced content editing, UI extremely configurable
• Content Templates: only used to fiind variable names, not used in live site
• More to come as my Drupal 6 site grows

Top 10 Drupal 5 Modules

Best Drupal 5 Modules

• Pathauto + Token
• Views
• Content Construction Kit (CCK)
• Imagefield + Imagecache
• CCK Field Permission: (now in CCK 6.x core) allows admin to restrict view/create/update access on specific cck fields
• Gmap Module
• Location (API, module)
• Google Analytics
• Lightbox2
• Embedded Media Field: integrates various 3rd party multimedia, such as YouTube and Flickr.

More Drupal 5 Modules

• Automatic Nodetitles
• Date
• TinyMCE
• Captcha: adds CAPTCHA text/math/image challenges to deter spambots
• Similar Entries: displays a block with the most similar nodes to the currently viewed one, based on title and body
• Private: simplest way to make a node private and viewable only by the "view all private nodes" role
• Devel: developer tools, adds "Dev render" tab to node and shows node variables (extremely useful!)
• Content Templates
• API: generates and displays API documentation, extremely useful when Internet not available or api.drupal.org is down
• Javascript Aggregator: (now in Drupal 6 core) aggregates and caches javascript files to increase performance
• Update Status: (now in Drupal 6 core) checks if Drupal core and modules are up to date
• Node Import: imports content from CSV/TSV files and auto-generates nodes
• Filter Default: sets default input format for each role (Filtered HTML for anonymous users, Full HTML for editors, PHP for admins)
• XML Sitemap: creates and automatically submits an XML site map of nodes/taxonomy terms/user profiles in accordance with the sitemaps.org specification to major search engines (google.com, yahoo.com, etc.)

Success in Chosing Drupal Modules

Not a shocker that my Drupal 6 modules are so similar to my Drupal 5 modules. When you do your research and chose your modules carefully, they're not likely to deprecate in the next Drupal release.

Compared to Lullabot's Top 40 Projects

This 'top Drupal 5 modules' was produced in celebration of Lullabot's 40th podcast: Drupal Podcast No. 40: Top 40 Projects back in May 2007. I have added a few comments to refresh the list.

1. Drupal Core (not a module, per-se)
2. CVS Integration / Project / Project Issue Tracking (no 6.x releases, I use TortoiseSVN (notice the website is even built in Drupal!))
3. Views
4. CCK
5. Pathauto
6. Devel
7. ImageCache
8. TinyMCE
9. API
10. Organic Groups (6.x rc release)
11. Panels (6.x alpha release, use template.php theming instead)
12. Actions (trigger functionality)
13. VotingAPI (voting functionality, 6.x rc release)
14. i18n (translation functionality)
15. Ecommerce (try Ubercart instead?)
16. Audio (deprecated, use Embedded Media Field instead)
17. Calendar (date functionality)
18. Date
19. Codefilter (format functionality, 6.x stable release)
20. Video (deprecated, use Embedded Media Field instead)
21. Image Field
22. Open ID (deprecated, now in Drupal 6 core)
23. Content Templates
24. Event ("deprecated", use CCK+Views+Date+Calendar instead)
25. Node Profile (user functionality)
26. Five Star (voting functionality, 6.x stable release)
27. Token
28. Zen/Zengine (not a module, but a theme)
29. Akismet (deprecated, use Mollom instead by Dries)
30. Automatic Node Titles
31. Workflow (trigger functionality)
32. Diff (revision functionality, 6.x stable release)
33. Custom Links/Custom Pagers/Custom Breadcrumbs
34. Amazon Associate Tools (deprecated, use Amazon instead by Eaton)
35. Simplenews (newsletter functionality, 6.x beta release)
36. Porter Stemmer (search functionality)
37. Case Tracker (deprecated, no 6.x release)
38. Revision Moderation (revision functionality, 6.x dev release)
39. Location
40. XML SiteMap