Essential Drupal 6 Modules

After building a few sites with Drupal 6, i have made a list of some of the best modules available for the CMS. Drupal is considered as an out of the box CMS with bundled functionality like user management, menu management and content management as core. Once you start integrating modules the CMS becomes super powerful. The tricky part is to evaluate and identify which ones.

Here is a list of modules i will recommend for starting up

• CCK ( Content Construction Kit )
  (Content construction kit, allows you to create new content types in Drupal, so instead of a simple page or news item you can tailor new content types to suit your material. Essential for most sites). CCK is very powerful and handy for most sites.
• Admin Menu
  Adds a drop down menu to the top of the admin pages. The drop down menu has links to all of the admin sections, seriously speeds up administrative tasks.
• FCK Editor
  Wysiwyg (What you see is what you get ) editor. Microsoft word type text editor which allows users to edit content without any knowledge of HTML. The content is translated into html.
• Nodewords (Meta Tags)
  Allows you to get hands on with page meta tags. Handy for SEO.
• Page Title
  Allows you to create unique title tags for nodes, something drupal doesn’t do out of the box.
• Views
  The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content (nodes in Views 1, almost anything in Views 2) are presented. Traditionally, Drupal has hard-coded most of this, particularly in how taxonomy and tracker lists are formatted.
  This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. It has four modes, plus a special mode, and provides an impressive amount of functionality from these modes.
• Webform
  One of the first things I did in Drupal was wonder how I should create a custom form. At first I thought I might have to get into the forms api to do it, but webform can create some very complex forms very easily. Its easy enough to use that clients (with a little bit of training) could create their own forms.