gestaltware

The Drupal community is rich in active developers. By my very unscientific survey, there are 1,110 contributed modules that are ostensibly 5.x compatible.¹ It can consequently be daunting for both newcomers and old hands alike to keep abreast of what's useful on the Drupal scene which is why lists of top modules are ever-popular. I came across the Top Drupal Modules list on UnSpun by Amazon, and was shocked by which modules did not make the cut on the community-ranked list.

Top Modules on UnSpun

1. Content Construction Kit
2. Views
3. Phptemplate Theme Engine
4. Tinymce Wysiwyg Editor
5. Printer Friendly Pages
6. Image Module
7. Akismet
8. Ajax Form Builder
9. Feedback
10. Control Panel
11. Simplenews
12. Ubercart
13. Flash Gallery
14. Adsense Injector
15. Blix Theme
16. Tagadelic
17. Project
18. Blockbar
19. Global Redirect
20. Auctionads Integration

For those that do not know of the service,² UnSpun is a community-based ranking system that has been succinctly summarized as "Digg for lists". While I do not want to argue against the inclusion of any of the modules listed -- notwithstanding the theme-related entries which were clearly voted in by people who ride the short bus -- I figure less than half of the community top 20 would make my personal must have list. For the more glaring omissions, I give some context on why I find them useful below.

The alpha and omega of must have's
For all but the simplest brochure-ware implementations, Content Construction Kit, Views, Workflow and Actions are essential for any Drupal project. Yet Workflow and Actions did not crack the top 5 or even top 10 of this list.³ I had taken it as a given that these four modules would be the alpha and omega of any must have list, and indeed had not even planned to review them since I considered it rehashing of heavily trodden ground. Apparently not. To put it another way, Drupal with these four modules is a modular platform for rapid application development; Drupal without them is just another (albeit well-executed) content management system.

Turning up taxonomy to 11
Drupal's taxonomy system is one of the strongest selling points for choosing the platform for any project. However, the classification process itself and (re-)use of this meta data is cumbersome. Fortunately, there are a number of contributed modules that pick up the slack. I have found Taxonomy Access Control Lite which extends taxonomy classification to user access, Taxonomy Super Select which makes selecting terms more straight-forward, Faceted Search which exposes meta data to search filtering, and Taxonomy Breadcrumb which simply makes breadcrumb navigation more intuitive, to name a few, critical additions for many projects. The only taxonomy-related module to make the community top 20 was Tagadelic.

Pleasing some of the people all of the time
As I ranked and re-ranked the modules in my own UnSpun list,⁴ I realized there should really be separate lists for different kinds of Drupal implementations: Top Drupal Modules for Content Management, Top Drupal Modules for Social Networks, Top Drupal Modules for Blogging, and so on. I have created a new Top Drupal Modules for Developers list to identify modules that most assist Drupal application development. If you're a fellow Drupal developer, please vote for your own favorites. One of the cool things about UnSpun is that users can change their votes at any time, so hopefully these lists become a real resource to the Drupal community. Rather than create yet another list, I have also begun writing reviews of what I consider to be must have modules, and plan to cover some of the modules mentioned above with a more detailed look.