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.
- Drupal Core (not a module, per-se)
- CVS Integration / Project / Project Issue Tracking (no 6.x releases, I use TortoiseSVN (notice the website is even built in Drupal!))
- Views
- CCK
- Pathauto
- Devel
- ImageCache
- TinyMCE
- API
- Organic Groups (6.x rc release)
- Panels (6.x alpha release, use template.php theming instead)
- Actions (trigger functionality)
- VotingAPI (voting functionality, 6.x rc release)
- i18n (translation functionality)
- Ecommerce (try Ubercart instead?)
- Audio (deprecated, use Embedded Media Field instead)
- Calendar (date functionality)
- Date
- Codefilter (format functionality, 6.x stable release)
- Video (deprecated, use Embedded Media Field instead)
- Image Field
- Open ID (deprecated, now in Drupal 6 core)
- Content Templates
- Event ("deprecated", use CCK+Views+Date+Calendar instead)
- Node Profile (user functionality)
- Five Star (voting functionality, 6.x stable release)
- Token
- Zen/Zengine (not a module, but a theme)
- Akismet (deprecated, use Mollom instead by Dries)
- Automatic Node Titles
- Workflow (trigger functionality)
- Diff (revision functionality, 6.x stable release)
- Custom Links/Custom Pagers/Custom Breadcrumbs
- Amazon Associate Tools (deprecated, use Amazon instead by Eaton)
- Simplenews (newsletter functionality, 6.x beta release)
- Porter Stemmer (search functionality)
- Case Tracker (deprecated, no 6.x release)
- Revision Moderation (revision functionality, 6.x dev release)
- Location
- XML SiteMap
