List of Top / Best Drupal Modules

Anybody that's ever built a Drupal site knows that it can be confusing browsing through trying to find which modules to use for your site. That is why we have compiled a list of the top Drupal modules that we commonly use on a number of sites we operate. We hope you find this list helpful!

1. Views - Views is probably the most essential module for Drupal. Views allows you to easily create unlimited page and block listings for your content. You can choose to show only certain node types, or only nodes with comments or whatever else you'd like and then you can order these listings however you would like. The views module is extremely flexible and powerful. It also provides a great API that allows other modules to hook into and share their content in views as well. Views can easily be duplicated and imported and exported to use on other sites. This module is a must have for pretty much any Drupal site.
2. CCK - Content Construction Kit (AKA CCK) is another extremely valuable module. CCK allows you to add fields onto your nodes. So lets say you want to have an Event node. You can create a new node type in the main core Drupal system and then extend it by adding a Date CCK field to it. Maybe you want to list a web site from each node. You can include the Link field on that particular node type. You can add as many different types of fields as you would like to any given node in Drupal. CCK allows for a great deal of flexibility.
3. Pathauto - Pathauto is another extremely valuable module for Drupal. With pathauto you are able to easily create custom URLs for nodes, users and taxonomy terms on the fly! You are able to basically use variables to use bits and pieces about the content and use that in the URL. You can have things like the title, date, author and type of content put in the URL automatically. The perfect module for any SEO!
4. LoginToboggin - LoginTobaggan is a great module that provides some very useful user features. With this module you can allow your users to login to your site with their email address or their username. You can also allow for various other options like allowing people to sign in automatically or choose their password instantly while signing up. Another very handy module.
5. Audio - The audio module takes care of everything audio related on your Drupal site. It provides an audio node which allows users to attach an MP3 file to their node along with information on the file. This is the best way to have people create and share any type of music or podcasts on your Drupal site. This module also provides a number of subscription feeds for people who use readers such as iTunes.
6. BBCode - BBCode is a pretty straight-forward and simple module that takes text input created by the user and does the required action for specific pieces of BB Code that are entered in. BBCode is a popular coding language used on forums such as vBulletin and PHPBB.
7. Buddylist - The buddylist module is essential for anyone looking to create a social networking site with friends. Buddylist allows users to create a friend list similar to those found on sites like MySpace or Facebook. You also have the options of allowing one-way buddies or requiring to have two-way buddies where both users must accept the buddy relationship. Another very useful module.
8. Codefilter - Code filter is a great module for technical web sites that often have programmers or developers posting code snippets. This module allows people to embed PHP code in <?php ?> tags and have the text render correctly with syntax highlighting. It also allows users to post other HTML and bits of code in the <code> </code> tags.
9. Date - The date module is a great module that provides a date field that can easily be integrated in with CCK. With this date field it is fairly easy to create various types of event nodes where certain days and timeframes are needed. With views it is also possible to list out everything as a calendar.
10. Devel
11. Diggthis - Diggthis is a small, handy module for web sites that are looking to have content easily published and voted for on Digg. The Diggthis module extends the Digg this widget that is provided by Digg. It allows any node to have a Digg this button on the top or bottom of that particular node so users can easily Digg an article.
12. Ecommerce - The ecommerce module is probably the biggest module Drupal has to offer. With about 30 submodules included in this package, it is almost in itself a mini-CMS. The ecommerce module has a number of useful shopping cart features one would expect to find on a shopping site. Some of these features include:
    • Taxes
    • Subscriptions and recurring payments
    • Donations module
    • Sell file downloads, shippable items and even collections of various products as a single item
    • Inventory management
    • Payment and shipping components are 'pluggable'. The system can use paypal, authorize.net, e-xact, C.O.D or you can roll your own.
    • Invoice generation and shipping notifications
    • Shopping cart and product 'look and feel' are themeable
    • Transaction reports and sales summaries
    • Transaction and payment workflow
    • Customers can review their order history
    • Dynamically adjust item prices for a given group of users
    • Run an auction site with the contributed auction module

    The ecommerce module is one of the most impressive modules and a must for anybody looking to sell products on their web site.

13. XML Sitemap - The XML Sitemap module creates a sitemap for the search engines according to the specifications set forth by sitemaps.org. This module is very useful as it will automatically take all the node types of your choice and include them in the proper format for the search engines. This can be very useful in getting pages indexed on Google.
14. Image - The Image module is just that - THE image module for Drupal. This module creates an image node type that allows users to upload various images and have these images created into smaller thumbnail versions. The administrator the site is allows to choose what size to resize the images to. One of the coolest parts about this module is that you can actually go back in and change your thumbnail sizes after they have been created and this module will go back through and resize these images off of the original image again. Super cool!
15. Javascript Tools - Javascript Tools offers a number of useful javascript widgets that can help speed up certain parts of Drupal. Some of these features are:
    • Collapsible Blocks
    • Expandable Menus via AJAX
    • Quick Commenting
    • Calendar Widget for Dates
16. Link - A fairly straight-forward module that allows for Link fields to be added to content types with CCK. The link field allows for various link options such as the url, title, and no follow attributes.
17. Captcha - Captcha is a great module that does a great job at preventing spam. This module allows users to provide a captcha in a number of places on your site such as comments, nodes and other commonly used forms. This module will show the user an image with random text to input or a question that they must answer in order to submit the form.
18. Organic Groups - Organic Groups is another monster of a module that allows for groups with Drupal. This is a great module for any social site that would like to allow users to have specific areas of discussion on the site. There are a number of features that users in each group can do such as have forums, events and subscriptions. This module also has a number of add-on modules which can open up even more features.
19. Poormanscron - Poormanscron is a fairly simple module that takes care of a common task. This module runs a Drupal cron job automatically after a certain number of minutes that you provide. This can be very useful for automatically doing tasks which need to be automated on the backend of Drupal.
20. Privatemsg - The Privatemsg module is very great for allowing users to interact on a site by sending private messages. These private messages are only seen between the two users interacting and allows for a quick way to contact somebody without having to know their email address. Privatemsg is an excellent module for anybody looking to create a social networking website.
21. Service Links - Service links is a very handy module that provides a number of social bookmarking links at the bottom, or top, of each node. Some of the sites include:
    • del.icio.us
    • Digg
    • Reddit
    • ma.gnolia.com
    • Newsvine
    • Furl
    • Google
    • Yahoo
    • Technorati
    • IceRocket

    This module also provides icons for each site which helps users quickly find the site of their choice.

22. Similar - Similar is a fairly powerful module that will go through your site's titles and body content to find relationships between nodes and their content. Based off these relationships this module will provide a block that lists out nodes that are similar to the node being viewed.
23. Smileys - Smileys is a solid module that changes normal text smiley faces to small little images of smiley faces. Things such as :) ;) :p will be converted to the proper image on the fly. These are very similar to the smiley faces that everyone has seen on various forums.
24. Tagadelic - Tagadelic provides "tag clouds" to your site by using your existing taxonomy. The module is very lightweight and simply finds the taxonomy terms in your category with the most nodes assigned to them and then gives these terms a larger font size on your site.
25. Taxonomy Theme - Taxonomy theme can be useful for sites looking to easily switch different themes based off taxonomy values or URLs. For instance, every page that is located in mysite.com/articles/ can be shows as one theme while the rest of the site uses another theme.
26. Thickbox - The Thickbox module integrates the jQuery ThickBox plugin into your Drupal site. This plugin allows you to have images and divs show up on the center of the screen with the rest of the site faded out. This can be useful for showing large images or for showing things like the user login screen.
27. Token - Token is required by a number of popular modules such as pathauto and ecommerce. If you are using a lot of modules, one of them will most likely require Token. This module works as an API for modules to store bits of text with placeholders.
28. Webform - Webform has to be one of the most necessary modules for any Drupal site. This module allows you to create a Webform node which enables you to add an unlimited number of form fields such as select drop downs, checkboxes, textareas and so forth. The data collected from this module is then emailed to an email of your choice. The data is also written to the database for referencing later as well. I would highly recommend the webform module!
29. Voting API -
30. Advanced Poll
31. Fivestar
32. Flag Content
33. FlashVideo
34. User Points
35. User Referral / Invite???
36. Vote Up/Down
37. Advanced User
38. Imagecache
39. Google Analytics
40. Nodetype
41. Actions
42. Workflow
43. Contemplate
44. Content Taxonomy
45. Adsense
46. Advertisement
47. Ubercart
48. Community Tags
49. Favorite Nodes
50. Forum Access - Forum Access provides the ability to have moderators for different sections on your Drupal forums. This module allows certain users to moderate posts in Forum A while other users can moderate posts from Forum B. This module also allows you to set certain forums as private where only certain roles can access the content of that forum.
51. Block Cache
52. Mass Contact
53. Double Click
54. Image watermark
55. Node Relativity
56. Accessibility
57. Calendar
58. Event
59. RSVP
60. Paging
61. Spellcheck
62. TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor
63. Wordfilter
64. Location
65. Simplenews
66. Flickr
67. Image Exact Sizes
68. Image Assist
69. Video
70. Internationalization
71. Spam
72. Taxonomy Access Control
73. Comment RSS
74. FeedBurner
75. Content Recommendation Engine
76. FeedButtons
77. Leech
78. Site map
79. Category
80. Directory
81. Form Tweaker
82. Similar By Terms
83. curvyCorners / Rounded corners ???
84. Focus - Focus is a small module that automatically selects the first textfield on a form and puts the cursor there so the user can start typing immediately.
85. Diff - Diff is a module that shows different revisions done to a node in a very user friendly, easy to see fashion. It highlights certain parts that have been changed between revisions similar to that of sites like Wikipedia.
86. login_destination
87. Panels - Panels is another one of those extremely powerful modules that allows you to create pages that are divided in different ways. With the use of panels it is very easy to create sections on a site that may have two columns side by side or a number of configurations.
88. Case Tracker
89. Address Field
90. SimpleMenu ??? / Drupal Administration Menu ??
91. Embedded Media Field - This module allows site administrators to allow a number of various video, image and audio content providers such as YouTube, Flickr, Google and others to be easily added to a CCK field.
92. Amazon associate tools - This module hooks into Amazon's ECS4 REST interface which allows you to easily add a bunch of products from Amazon onto your site. This module creates two different node types, one for the amazon products and one for reviews. This module also provides a block displaying random amazon items.
93. Database Administration - This module allows administrators to go through and access the site's database right there on the site. This can be a good time saver for certain tasks as you can change the database right there on your Drupal site.
94. Accents - Accents is a handy filter that will go through and replace characters like "á â Å ã" with something more meaningful for search engines like "a".
95. Tweakbox
96. modr8 - modr8 allows admins to quickly go through and manage content that is in moderation.
97. Fasttoggle
98. Printer Friendly Pages - A very handy little module for any site that offers a lot of content that people will often want to print out to read later.
99. Trackback
100. Node Profile
101. Project
102. CVS
103. Adsense Injector
104. Feedback

categories:

the essentials

shopping sites

community sites

content

administration

Top SEO Modules for Drupal

Top Blog Modules for Drupal

javascript / widgets