Beginners with DrupalDrupal is a content management system (http://www.drupal.org) are often lost among the vast quantity of modules they need to take to start a project.
The Drupal archive is called the core. It is just enough to enable a base of work but limits can come quickly.
For any project I am starting, those are the ones which are always taken :
CCK : http://drupal.org/project/cck
The CCK (Content Construction Kit) module allows to create some content type templates. Drupal is coming with some basic ones but you might want to use some others.
Why ?
For various reasons :
- You need some special fields because the entities you want to create are well defined, they need a date, an url, a logo, a short description, a long description, an address, a style etc ...
- You want to give a structure to your content in order to automate some selections in it. As we'll see with the next module
Views : http://drupal.org/project/views
Views is married with CCK. Views is a query builder in your content allowing to select fields and display them in a formatted way.
Imagine you want to select all the News categorized as Politics posted by users categorized as "Talented", you want just the 10 last ones, sorted by date by default but with the possibility to sort by user also. Also you just want to display the title, and you would like this to appear in a block going at the top of the right column.
Views is the tool to do so.
Admin menu
That is a very nice piece of module for admin allowing to parse the menus of the sites in the way it should be, i.e. like a desktop software.
Captcha
Everybody wants to get rid of spammers. Mandatory.
Dhtml Menu
This module prevents the page to be reloaded each time to click on a menu. So it saves time.
