Use these Modules

I use these modules on almost every Drupal site I build:

1. Views

Using the Views module, you can get content from the database and present it to the user as lists, posts, galleries, tables, maps, graphs, menu items, blocks, reports, forum posts etc. It provides a graphical interface to a SQL query builder that can access virtually any information in your database and display it in any format. You can also use Views to present related content. For example, you can display a list of users along with links to the content they have created.

2. PathAuto

The Pathauto module automatically generates URL/path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, taxonomy terms, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows you to have URL aliases like /category/my-node-title instead of /node/123. The aliases are based upon a "pattern" system that uses tokens which the administrator can change.

3. References

Defines common base features for the various reference field types. This project provides Drupal 7 versions of the 'node_reference' and 'user_reference' field types, that were part of the CCK package in Drupal 6, at functional parity with the Drupal 6 counterparts.

4. Display Suite

Allows you to take full control over how your content is displayed using a drag and drop interface. Arrange your nodes, views, comments, user data etc. the way you want without having to work your way through dozens of template files.

5. Panels

The Panels module allows a site administrator to create customized layouts for multiple uses. At its core it is a drag and drop content manager that lets you visually design a layout and place content within that layout. Integration with other systems allows you to create nodes that use this, landing pages that use this, and even override system pages such as taxonomy and the node page so that you can customize the layout of your site with very fine grained permissions.

6. Chaos tool suite (ctools)

This suite is primarily a set of APIs and tools to improve the developer experience. It also contains a module called the Page Manager whose job is to manage pages. In particular it manages panel pages, but as it grows it will be able to manage far more than just Panels.

7. BUEditor

BUEditor is a text editor aiming to facilitate code writing. Features: Completely customizable editor interface, ability to create both image and text buttons, per role editor assignments, native support for html tags, bbcode tags, and other markup systems.

8. Backup and Migrate

Back up and restore your Drupal MySQL database and files or migrate a site between environments. Backup and Migrate supports gzip, bzip and zip compression as well as automatic scheduled backups. With Backup and Migrate you can dump some or all of your database tables to a file download or save to a file on the server or offsite, and to restore from an uploaded or previously saved database dump. You can choose which tables and what data to backup and cache data is excluded by default.