Drupal Essentials: Top 10 Modules that your Drupal site should run

I've talked to a bunch of people lately on which Drupal modules I run most often. A lot of the website that I've been working on recently, I've found myself installing the same modules over and over again. Tedious as it is, I've ended up just setting up an install profile that allows me to setup a site with each module pre-installed. Simple! Check here to find out more on how to setup your own installation profile. So with no further adieu, I present my top 10 Drupal modules.

Drupal Core
What's a drupal site with the drupal core?!

CCK
CCK allows administrators and webmasters to customize and add fields to nodes, content types, and anything you can create. It's all about customization, so get in there!

Views
Views enables admins to populate data and customizes the output of it. If you want to have a different look on how your content is displayed, check out views.

TinyMCE
This module integrates the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor into a Drupal site for editing advance site content. TinyMCE is a web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor that has the ability to convert HTML to editor instances.

Panels
Panels works wonders when in conjunction with Views. Panels allows you to totally customize the way your site is to be viewed. It allows you to move sections of your site around while using it's very intuitive UI created with some pretty AJAX. Similar to Google homepage.

Google Analytics
The Google Analytics module combines statistic tracking for certain users or areas of your site by using the Google Analytics program.

Meta Tags
Meta tags module allows you to apply keywords that are specific to the currently viewed node or page to the meta keywords tag. Essential for a higher ranking in search engines.

Imagecache
If you're planning on using CCK, or wanting to do some sort of gallery on your website, take a look at the imagecache module. Imagecache allows you to resize, reposition, and minimize your images  that are uploaded via CCK or the upload module. Could possibly be a huge save in your bandwidth and space (although the original file is still uploaded and kept on your server). 

Devel
If  you develop for Drupal, this is a must. no questions asked. Go get it. (it tracks your mem usage, shows your available variables, strings, arrays, and lots lots more... ).

Pathauto
Pathauto allows you to automajically rename the paths of your newly created blog posts, pages, or stories. Great for SEO!

I hope some of you guys check these out, because I believe they're some of the most essential modules for Drupal. If you think I'm missing some feel free to contact us so I can add some. Cheers!