I'm a big fan of Drupal, and one of the things I think that makes it great are the add-on modules that you can download and add to your Drupal installation.

That being the case, there are some modules that I consider to be absolutely essential to getting the most out of Drupal. I install these modules on just about any Drupal instance I build so that I can save time when putting the actual content on the site. Here is the list of modules in no particular order:

• Poormanscron - Drupal has a cron facility which is invoked by periodically calling cron.php. One way to do this is by writig an external script to call cron.php and placing it on a machine somewhere. Not only is that cumbersome, but if the script stops running you won't know until Drupal starts behaving weirdly.

  The other way to make sure that cron.php gets run regularly is by installing Poormanscron instead. It adds a hook into every page that's loaded to ensure that the cron.php script is run on a regular basis.

• Acidfree - Software to manage photos and videos with Drupal. It allows you to group images into Albums and place albums within other albums. It automatically creates thumbnails of uploaded images and more! You can see my installation of Acidfree over here.
   

• Filemanager and Attachment - File manager provides an API for storing large amounts of files on a Drupal server. It does this by breaking them down into nested directories, which is much better than the default method of putting everything in one directory.

  The Attachment module is a replace for the Upload module in that it lets you create attachments for nodes that use the Filemanager API.

• Menu on-the-fly - This handy module allows you to create new menu items while editing a node. This saves time versus the default method, which involves remembering the URL of the node and creating a new menu item in the menu editing page.
   

• Smileys - This fun module replaces emoticons with their graphic equivilents. Have some Drupal and smile.
   

• Taxonomy Access Control - This module lets you restrict viewing/editing/updating access to certain categories based on the user's role. This can be useful if you'd like to given certain users privileges to edit nodes in certain categories. Also useful if you'd like to create private forum topics for select members.
   

• Troll - This module lets you blacklist certain IP addresses for an arbitrary length of time. Very helpful if you find yourself being harassed by Something Awful Goons.
   

• Webform - Allows the creation of a new node type called "webform", which is a web-based form. When submitted, the results can be emailed to you and saved to a database. This is useful if you'd like to set up a "contact form" for your website for visitors to fill out and leave feedback.
   

• Diff - Just like the UNIX utility of the same name, this lets you view differences between revisions of a node. Useful if you have multiple people with editing privileges on your website and want to keep on eye on who does what.
   

• Captcha - Can be used to add a computer generated field that only a human can read to the user registration form and comments forms. This is a technique to cut down on automated spamming attempts. (What is a captcha?)
   

• Autotimezone - This module is used to automatically change a user's timezone to whatever their machine is set to. This is helpful for users that travel between timezones, as well as users in timezones that have daylight savings time. As soon as the GMT offset on their computer changes, autotimezone will update the timezone in the user preferences.

Note that the above list applies to Drupal 4.6.5.

I often install additional modules, based on requirements for the actual website that I am building, but I think that what's listed above are good starting points. If there are modules that you consider absolutely essential to running Drupal and think that they should be mentioned above, please let me know about them.

If you found this article useful, you might find these other resources of interest:

• Essential Drupal Tips for Drupal 4.6.5 - This article covers some "gotchas" in Drupal 4.6.5. Most useful for people who are new to Drupal.
• My Drupal Modules page - Some Drupal modules which I have written.

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