There are 10,660 “full-projects” modules and counting for Drupal 7 and the list gets intimidating. Whenever I develop a new Drupal 7 website, I always include a specific set of modules by default, and here are the essential modules in my list.

1. Views

Create customized lists and queries from your database.

2. Pathauto

Provides a mechanism for modules to automatically generate aliases for the content they manage.

3. Backup and Migrate

Backup the Drupal database and files or migrate them to another environment.

4. Features

Provides feature management for Drupal.

5. Media

Provides the core Media API.

6. Administration menu

Provides a dropdown menu to most administrative tasks and other common destinations to users with the proper permissions.

7. Devel

Various blocks, pages, and functions for developers. Generate dummy users, nodes, and taxonomy terms. This module should be disabled in the production server.

8. Rules

React on events and conditionally evaluate actions.

9. CKEditor

WYSIWYG HTML editor to use instead of plain text fields.

10. IMCE

Image and file uploader and browser supporting personal directories and user quota.

11. Entityform

Provides fieldable entity forms

12. Date

Makes date/time fields available.

13. Menu block

Provides configurable blocks of menu items.

14. Context

Manage contextual conditions and reactions for different portions of your site.

15. Custom Search

Customize the default search, change labels, default texts, ordering, and display content types and taxonomy selectors.

16. Diff

Show differences between content revisions.

17. Redirect

Allows users to redirect from old URLs to new URLs.

18. Linkit

Provides an easy interface for inserting links.

19. Shortcut per Role

Creates default shortcut per role.

20. Site map

Provides a site map that gives visitors an overview of your site.

Conclusion

There are other essential modules depending on the needs of your Website. For instance, I like to use the Bibliography Module to manage and display publications.

I also like to use the Node Revision Restrict module to restrict revisions of node for each content type. This helps reduce database size, enhance site performance and improve execution time of node load functionality.

I personally don’t use the Google Analytics module since I add the snippet of code directly into the template file (html.tpl.php).

If you have anything to say, please share your opinion in the comments section. Your opinion matters, unless it is a Spam.