5 Drupal modules that just make sense and you should install right away

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! :-)