Our Top 10 Favorite Drupal Modules

We here at Two Trees media are big fans of Drupal, an über-powerful open source content management system. But it's really more than a CMS; it can be configured as an e-commerce platform, blog back-end, project collaboration tool, social networking software, or pretty much anything you can hope a website can do.

The power in Drupal is in its active developer community who has made all sorts of free add-on modules that let website owners brew up their own custom blend of functionality for their corner of the net. Modules are fairly easy to install and configure, all you need to build a fairly powerful site is FTP software and a working knowledge of coding for the interwebs.

So, without further ado, here's the official top 10 list of our favorite Drupal modules (in no particular order):

1. Content Construction Kit

Out of the box, Drupal comes with several basic types of content: Blog, Page, Story, and Book. Using Views (see below), there's some pretty nifty things you can do with just these. But to really rock your site, CCK (as it's known to its friends) lets you define custom content types and specify associated fields. For example, on 2trees-media.com we've defined a Portfolio Item content type that lets us associate a client name, date completed, URL, and a screenshot. You can pretty much create any item type (content), and associate different properties (fields) with it. Using views, you can create some pretty powerful pages and layouts.

2. Views

If CCK lets you make custom content types, Views lets you customize, well, the view of your content. It's almost as if you are building a database query on your content that you can format however you want. You can specify which fields to show, how to show them, and criteria for including nodes. On this website, our main blog page is an example of a view. We've shown the blog post's title, date posted, content, and comment count. We've specified that only published items are shown, and they should be sorted descending (from newest to oldest). Views lets us do this all through an easy-to-use web-based interface.

3. Panels

Fitting nicely in with the customize your site theme of this article, Panels lets you show multiple views on one page. This is especially helpful for building hub pages with lots of different content types. It has a drag-n-drop interface that lets administrators build layouts, then populate layouts with content. Panels accepts parameters, which means you can pass criteria into your pages. We've found Panels to be especially great in building product pages for e-commerce sites, where you want multiple views shown in separate buckets on the same page.

4. Pathauto

We know from paying attention during our SEO classes that user-friendly URLs get better search rankings than those with querystrings (like mysite.com/?n=123). Drupal lets you customize paths when you create a node, but who wants to enter a path every time you put new content on your site? Pathauto lets you automate the generate of those paths using whatever pattern you specify through a nifty web-based interface. You can use "tokens" in your paths, such as date created, author, category, or content type.

5. Path Redirect

Say you ported a Typepad Blog to Drupal, and your URL path structure changed. How are you going to tell search engines where your new pages are? Path Redirect lets you do this with ease. It provides an interface to create 301 redirects, which tell search engines a page has been moved and its new location. The redirect for users is seamless, there is no pause or disabling of the back button that sometimes occurs with JavaScript. This module is a must-have for those concerned about SEO!

6. XML Sitemap

Many sites live or die based on their search engine rankings. Having an XML Sitemap ensures that search engines are aware of your content and can spider it accordingly. The XML Sitemap module automates the creation and submission of sitemaps by adding nodes to the sitemap as you create them. No need to create a page then mess with adding it to your sitemap and FTPing it to your server then telling Google you've updated it. XML Sitemap will do all that for you! Well, with the exception of writing your content. You're still stuck doing that (unless you hire Two Tress Media to do the dirty work for you).

7. FCKeditor

Having a website doesn't mean you have to know how to program HTML. A rich text editor lets you enter your content without having to know a lick of programming. FCKeditor is our WYSIWYG editor of choice for Drupal. It is easy to configure and lets administrators decide which functionality to show based on user role, from no rich text editor all the way to uploading and managing files. Appealing to the code monkey in us, it outputs the cleanest HTML code we've seen in a rich text editor. Although installation is a little bit tricky (make sure a read the readme.txt file before enabling the module), you'll be up and running in no time.

8. Organic Groups

At its simplest level, Organic Groups (OG) "enable[s] users to create and manage their own 'groups'." What this means for site administrators is you can control access to a content at the individual user level. Say you are setting up your Drupal site and you want to have one section walled off from the public to be used to collaborate on projects. OG lets you do that by only allowing the users you grant access to view, edit, or comment on particular nodes. We've found this to be most handy for project-management type situations, and in fact, 2trees-media.com relies extensively on Organic Groups for its client project section. Depending on configuration, users can also be entitled to create their own groups allowing for a nice level of web 2.0 community for your site.

9. Webform

Out of the box, Drupal comes with a Contact module that lets admins set up a site-wide "contact us" form that users can use to send basic information to a specified email address. But what if there are more fields you want to collect from the submission than just name, email address, and comment? Webform lets site admins build custom forms that send emails to whoever you specify. On 2trees-media.com, we use Webform as our Contact Us form, which let us specify a field for project timeframe and customize the labels on the other fields. This module would be very helpful for sites that need to collect more detailed user information with their submissions.

10. Ubercart

Ubercart is "an exciting open source e-commerce package that fully integrates your online store with Drupal." It pretty much lets you do all sorts of e-commerce stuff on your website without a lot of programming knowledge. The best part about this module for small businesses is that you can start accepting online orders with a minimal amount of back-end configuration. Ubercart is fully integrated with Paypal, so startups don't have to worry about signing up for a credit card merchant account. Ubercart is so so powerful, but so very easy to use.

Do you have any other Drupal modules you just can't live without? Please leave them in the comments!