If there is something that makes great CMS like Drupal in these days is, undoubtedly, the number of modules or plugins availables, whether made by the community or by professionals who try to live with it. 

Focusing on Drupal extensions, the quantity of modules currently available is huge, more than 18000. Therefore, it's good to have a guide to those who are essential to almost any web project.

Mandatory list of modules for any Drupal website

Administration

• Administration menu: generate a drop down menu for site management. It's much better than the original toolbar that comes with Drupal 7.

• Backup and Migrate: essential to make a quick backup of your database. It's always recommended to make backup when we try new modules or want to test new configurations.

Editing Content

• Wysiwyg: unlike others CMS like Wordpress, Drupal doesn't include a rich text editor by default (maybe in Drupal 8?). This module lets activate some editors like CKEditor or TinyMCE.

• TinyMCE: between CKEditor and TinyMCE, I prefer the second one. It works perfectly, been really comfortable add or edit content in Drupal.

• IMCE: file management with a nice explorer. It has some interesting features about permissions, quotas, image resize, folders, etc. 

• IMCE Wysiwyg bridge: integrates IMCE with the rich text editor, so we can add pictures from our computer directly to our article in a very easy way.

• Wysiwyg SpellCheck: this module add a new icon in the rich text editor that allows us to check spelling in several languages, basic to avoid syntax errors.

• Transliteration: very useful to automatically avoid characters that can be a problem with the unix file system, as accents o foreign chars.

• Pathauto: automatically generate friendly URL. We can even add some patterns for the content we want, making our website more logical.

Modules needed for other modules in this list

• Libraries API: manage external libraries for Drupal, like rich text editors, javascript libraries, etc.

• Chaos tool suite (ctools): needed for several key modules as Views, Date, Panels, etc.

Display content

• Panels: the perfect module to display all kind of Drupal content the way you want. You can integrate in the same page blocks, nodes, views, user properties, etc. in the order and display desired.

• Views: the module that make Drupal far away from others CMS. We can present Drupal content in several ways with Views, like tables, grid, lists, slideshow, pictures, etc. Also, we can include filters, order criteria, pagination, relation between others contents, export data to csv, pdf, etc, etc.

• Token: basic to help us to generate internal directions for our project.

Multi language

• Internationalization: essential if we need the website with more than one language.

• Localization Client: this module comes in handy for translate strings in the same page that we are.It adds a bar at the bottom of the page, where we can search for a string in the content and directly translate it.

• Localization update: automatically search  for new translations available in Drupal.org for each module installed.

• Language icons: add flags icons for each language activated.

SEO (Search engine Optimization)

• In this post you can find several modules that can improve SEO of any website: http://guillermocerezo.com/en/blog/drupal-top-10-seo-modules

These modules should be included in every Drupal instance, although the complete list is always going to be a bit different for every project.

Bonus: It's interesting to keep an eye to the list of modules with more downloads from Drupal.org

http://drupal.org/project/usage/

Fuente imagen: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yukop/