Top 10 Drupal 5 and Top 10 Drupal 6 Modules

Posted December 25, 2008

Update (Jan. 1, 2010) - Lullabot updated their Top 40 Drupal Modules for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7!

Drupal is awesome and grows in awesomeness all the time. It's easy to fall for the glam and glitz of certain jQuery and multimedia modules and install them all. So take some time to read the forums and you'll find that a lot can be achieved with CCK+Views and template.php instead. Remember: less modules means less system load, better performance and easier upgradability!

So without further ado, here are my top 10 modules for Drupal 6 and Drupal 5. It's safe to say, we need not talk about Drupal 4.7 (even less Drupal 4.6, eek!).

Drupal 6: Top 10 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

Drupal 5: Top 10 Modules

Best Drupal 5 Modules

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.)

Hehe, not a shocker that my Drupal 6 modules are so similar to Drupal 5! Besides, I always do my research and chose modules that are core-friendly and not likely to depricate in the next Drupal release. Read my article on How to Chose your Drupal Modules.

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