The Official Website of Zach Ferres

The following is a list of essential modules for creating a blog site using Drupal 6. I figured I would go ahead and create this since I couldn't find much when I did a Google search for "cool modules for a drupal blog".

The Basics

• CCK (also be sure to grab ImageField, FileField, and Link) - CCK is still my all time favorite module for Drupal. Part of CCK is moving to the core in Drupal 7). These fields along with CCK will let you create (and control) all of your blog content types
• Views (CTools, LightBox2) - Views are essential for dynamic content display. Be sure to tak advantage of the 'Use AJAX' functionality for paging and exposed filters. LightBox can add some great effects for image galleries and image display.
• Poormanscron - Unless you are manually setting up CRON jobs it is almost a necessity.
• Pathauto - Helps to create user-friendly (and search engine friendly) URLs for your site content.
• Captcha - Despite the annoyance factor of the blurred and hard to read images make sure you install CAPTCHA to reduce spam attempts.

Blog Stuff

• Tagadelic - Creates a tag block on your website that automatically adjusts the font size of specific taxonomy terms (tags) based on their usage frequency. You see this on lots of blogs.
• IMCE (Also get IMCE WYSIWYG Bridge to integrate with WYSIWYG module) - Great for inline images in blog content as well as scaling and file management.
• WYSIWYG (With the TinyMCE library) - Unless you want to waste time writing all of your content in HTML code, grab the WYSIWYG module for Drupal 6 and get the TinyMCE library (or a library of your choice). Make sure you read the readme file on how to install the library properly.
• ImageAPI and ImageCache - Nifty tools for adding image content to blogs and pages (through ImageField/CCK integration). This can also be used in conjunction with views and thickbox to create image galleries.
• Video - Even as a CCK guru, I have switched back to the Video module because of its new features to add video from a URL, YouTube, or by upload.
  
• Aggregator (in core) - I used this to create a Twitter block that can display my most recent five twitter posts.

Social Media Integration

• AddThis - This module places a little AddThis button on specified site content (blog posts, video, images, etc). It allows users to add the site or post about the site on their social media sites.
• Follow - This one lets users follow you on social networking sites. It has a nice administration pane that allows you to enter in your profile links and it uses a nice GPL icon set.
• Ping.FM - This lets your new site content posts (blog entries, videos, images) push to your Ping.FM account so you can inform your followers of the new content post.

SEO/SEM Tools for Your Blog

• AddThis - From a SEO standpoing the AddThis button can increase your site traffic and exposure by letting other users pass your content along to their networks.
• Node Words - This lets you specify custom META descriptions and keywords for your site content. Remember to keep your descriptions less than 150 characters and use less than 10 keywords.
• XML Sitemap - This tool will syncronize your sitemap with the search engines on a given interval. Make sure you choose an interval that is approximately equal to your update frequency as slamming search engines with a redundant sitemap can hurt your SEO score.
• Google Analytics - This module simply connects your site to your Google Analytics account so you can analyze your site traffic.

Modified on 7/19/09 after realizing that ThickBox was somewhat limiting. LightBox2 was added because it is extremely configurable.