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When developing a Drupal site, it's quite common to have at least one custom module with some overrides and settings. It's quite tempting to call it with the same name of the project.

It is also quite common to have a custom theme, maybe a zen or fusion subtheme, or a renamed version of basic. You might think it's a good Idea to call your theme again with the same name.

Well, don't! It will cause all sorts of weird problems. The most common being that your custom blocks won't show up. (also, some kittens will suffer and die).

So, never call a drupal theme and a drupal module the same way!

Drupal is great, flexible, extensible, elegant (most of the time), delicious! But, sometimes it's also obnoxious, wierd, obscure, purely annoying.

Of course, the great strength of this CMS lies in the modules. And so lots of people around the world wrote essential modules to help round the sharp edges and minor annoyances that you, especially if you're new to Drupal will surely meet.

So, here's a list of the most useful modules you should just install right away to make your drupal experience so much better from the start.

In this list I won't talk about the usual and most famous ones, like pathauto, imagecache, views or cck. You should already know them. Don't you? :-)

Instead I will focus on the least known tiny modules that you might have missed, and I have found after hours of hopeful googling.

So, let's start.

404 blocks

get it here: http://drupal.org/project/blocks404

With a standard drupal installation, when your users hit a non-existing link, they get a nice 404 message from drupal. Nice. But, this page is stripped of all navigation elements and blocks. So, not very helpful. And wierd.

This tiny module will fix this, and your blocks will be there so that your users can find their way home. Easy!

Comment Notify

get it here: http://drupal.org/project/comment_notify

Allows registered and anonymous users to be notified of new comments on articles or posts (nodes). This is a must if you want your users to come back to your site (and you do).

External Links

get if here: http://drupal.org/project/extlink

It will help distinguish internal links from external ones. You can choose to open all external links in a new window (a bit rude, but still useful).

Read More Tweak

get it here: http://drupal.org/project/ed_readmore

Allows you to move the "read more" link at the end of the teaser of a node. This has been bothering me for years. Very tiny and effective module!

Vertical Tabs

get it here: http://drupal.org/project/vertical_tabs

A great improvement for the node editing form. Try it and you'll understand.

That's all for now, I'll keep you posted of my new findings as they happen. Good night! :-)

If for some reason you need to download videos from Youtube, one of the best tools in my opinion is a tiny program written in Python called Clive.

If you are using Ubuntu, you can install from the command line using the usual:

sudo apt-get install clive

After this, if you find yourself with the need to download for example my turtle having fun with a rock, you just issue the command:

clive http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB6FCWyzmjI

But, and this is where it gets very useful, if you need to get multiple videos, you just need to put the list in a text file. In the text file, put each url in a separate new line.

Then you can use:

cat list.txt | clive

And clive will download everything for you. The files will be named according to the title of the youtube page and you can enjoy kitten fighting and people falling from bikes anytime you want! :-)