I've heard before that one of the easiest ways to contribute to the Drupal community is to write up a big ol' list of the modules you use in Drupal. So I'm going to do some more meta-blogging and list the modules currently used to power this site and why.

Two common modules that are missing from my install are TinyMCE and CCK. TinyMCE just outputs awful HTML and for me it's not worth the wrangling. I wish there was a better way but I currently edit all of my content as raw HTML. On my list of things to do is to integrate CodePress, which is a nice little syntax highlighter for textareas. I'd love to pair up a syntax highlighter with some simple autocompletion... that to me would be perfect for advanced content editing. There's a stub here, so maybe that can built on. Also missing is CCK. This module is a part of most Drupal installations but so far I haven't needed it. Any custom content types I have were defined in their own module.

Without further ado, here is my module list:

Core

• Blog — provides simple blog functionality
• Comment — provides commenting
• Menu — provides menu items, primarily used for admin navigation but also holds custom menus for 'People' and 'Sources' in the footer of each page.
• Statistics — provides the number of reads found in the info for each post, I used Google Analytics for real site statistics
• Taxonomy — provides tagging for each post. I only have one vocabulary for freetagging of every piece of content.

Bookmarklet

This is a series of custom modules that allow me to publish using a 'bookmarklet' (a link from you bookmarks toolbar). I am hoping to one day wrap this into a tumblr-like install profile and integrate with CCK.

• Bookmarklet — bookmarklet functionality
• Bookmarklet Link — defines a custom content type for links
• Bookmarklet Quote — defines a custom content type for quotes

Image

• Image — for handling images within Drupal, mostly default settings
• Image Import — comes bundled with image module for importing batches from FTP, only used this once but it worked well
• Image assist — inserting images into content is still tricky in Drupal and for me this is the easiest solution. Another drop-in solution to the same problem would be IMCE.

Other

• Akismet — wouldn't leave home without this one monitoring spam
• Comment Notify — allows for follow up emails to users who leave comments
• Comment Mail — sends me an email when a comment is posted to the site, probably could handle this with actions but this works fine for now
• Google Analytics — simple Google Analytics integration for the site.
• Open ID — trying to embrace the future with Open ID. Still working on integrating this module since I would like the login form to show up inline with comments. This site is mostly for blogging and not community so that would probably make most sense. Excited to see this module eventually work as an Open ID server.
• Theme Settings API — to take advantage of some of the Zen theme's advanced doings
• Trackback — this is to ping blogs that I have linked to in an attempt to build some SEO
• Tylor Helper — just a custom helper module to do form alters. It currently adds some extra CSS classes to the comment form.

SimpleFeed

I've used this for a while to import my flickr, delicious, and twitter feeds. This module works great but I will eventually move to the much more powerful FeedAPI module.

• SimpleFeed — defines the SimpleFeed engine
• SimpleFeed Item — defines the feed item content type

Views

I use views to create my custom front page and tumblog page by restricting what types of content can appear on what page.

• Views — main Views module
• Views RSS — creates RSS feeds for my custom views
• Views UI — default UI bundled with the module

And that's it! I'd like to see what other modules people are using, so leave me a comment if I missed anything good or if you compiled your own list. Also, if anyone has time to work on a CodePress module, I'd like to collaborate. I think having an extra set of hands would help bring some focus.