Essential Drupal Modules

Lately, I've been creating Drupal social networking sites, rather than just plain ol vanilla WordPress blogs. Don't get me wrong, WordPress is great for a blog. But if you want to step it up, take it to the next level...try Drupal.

I've compiled a list of Essential Drupal Modules that you should have installed on your site. Here it is:

• account_reminder - Reminds the user they haven't activated their account
• adsense - Allows you to run Adsense ads
• adsense_injector - Puts the Adsense ads on your site
• akismet - Great for spam control
• audio - Allows you to add audio to your site
• birthdays - Allows people to enter their bday, it will send them an email on their bday
• buddylist - Users can create buddylists
• captcha - Makes users answer a question before submitting content
• commentmail - Notifies you of new comments on your site
• ed_readmore - Puts the "read more" in a better location
• event - Creates an event calendar
• extlink - Open external links in a new window
• google_analytics - Makes your site Google Analytics friendly
• gsitemap - Makes your site Google sitemap friendly
• image - Allows you to create an image gallery
• imce - File upload control
• invite - Invite a friend
• mimemail - Needed for email from the site
• month - Create a monthly archive
• moxie - Editor buttons for creating content
• nodevote - People can vote on content
• nodewords - Meta tags for each post
• pathauto - Creates search engine friendly titles rather than /node/01, etc.
• privatemsg - Send private messages between users
• remember_me - Puts a check box on login page
• send - Email content to others
• service_links - Puts technorati, digg, furl, etc. buttons beneath your posts
• similar - Allows you to put links to similar posts under your articles
• snap_preview - Allows you to preview external websites
• tagadelic - Create Technorati tags for each post
• user_register_notify - Tells you when new users sign up
• userpoints - Users can earn points for posting content
• video - Add youtube, google, etc. videos to the site
• views - Needed by a lot of things

Go to http://drupal.org and sort the modules alphabetically. Grab the ones that you need. There are also a ton of other modules there. These are just the standard ones I've used. Also, be sure to test all modules on a test site before putting them on your production site.

If you have any Drupal modules that need to be added to my Essential Drupal Modules, please post in the comments.

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