Building websites in Drupal is really fun. It feels like i'm back playing with my lego when I was a kid.

I met Drupal about 6 months ago, and since then we've been best friends, however learning the CMS took some time and I'm still learning new things all the time. There are some modules however which I think are really essential in any standard installation of Drupal when you think of starting a new website.

These are the lifesavers:

1. Views

Views took me a while to understand but when you get the hang of it you can't be without it. It helps you create more customized nodes like pages or blocks. 

Some things you can create with Views include: 

Recent comments block

Gallery (when integrated with Image Upload)

Most read articles block (when integrated with Radioactivity)

Best rated content (when integrated with Fivestar)

And the list goes on.

2. Pathauto

A great module when you want to improve the usability of your site and improve your rank in the SERP's with Google. It transforms the original URL's of your site from like /node/3 to /articles/better-urls/.

3. Panels

When you care for the look of your site, panels is a great module for organizing content on your pages. You can stack blocks or Views on each other in different layouts and use different CSS files for them if you want.

4. Wysiwyg API

Creates a Wysiwyg interface when creating nodes and you can use some editors like TinyMCE or FCKeditor to make your life much easier when creating content. 

5. Backup and Migrate

When you have a big site or a lot of sites that you want to backup, this is a great module for taking backups. Very easy to backup sites and re-install them.

6. Administration Menu

Actually I just discovered this module and I feel bad for not doing so earlier. The default navigation menu in drupal is horrible when your designing a website or just want to do some quick changes. This module creates a small bar in the top which looks really good and is really useful.

7. CCK

I've not yet experienced this modules true potential. But I´ve built some handy things with CCK and Views and think this one should be on this list as well.

Basically it lets you add custom fields to different content types which let you show more customized content. 

8. Google Analytics

This is perhaps the simplest module of them all and it does its job great. Just enter your Analytics reference number and it starts to track all your nodes and files. No more editing of files.

There are more modules out there, but these modules has a very special place in my Drupal folder but I think ill make a separate post for them.