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musthave

Admin Menu

Adds a dyanmic administrative navigation bar to the top of every page for quick access to virtually any admin page.

The Admin Menu module uses javascript and css to create a dynamic administrative menu bar at the top of every page on your site. You can decide which users can utilize the menu bar via the module's permissions. In addition to providing virtually all of the administrative links, it also has handy links for running cron, clearing caches, disabling developer modules, drupal.org, and accessing the "my account" page.

Stats

Learning curve: none
Resources:
- Screencast
- Download this module from the official Drupal.org project page

What is more fun? Drilling down into your site's administrative area page-by-page or sticking needles in your eyes? Wait - don't answer yet; I'll give you a third option - how about memorizing Drupal's admin area URLs in an effort to avoid the dreaded page refresh? (all those guilty of the third option raise your hands - me included)

Views

You have all this content, you need to list it, sort it, filter it, form relationships, make it look pretty. We consider Views a must-have!

Views is a universal API to let any user or module make a list of just about anything on your Drupal site: views comes with the ability to list all of Drupal's "first class objects":

Nodes: most views list nodes, and nodes have the most power and felxibility in a Drupal site
Aggregator Items: list stories in an RSS feed, sort them, filter them
Comments: maybe list all comments in moderation, or comments from users with the Editor role
Files: think: all files by one user, all MP3 files
Node revisions: Peek into the history of your content
Taxonomy Terms: Create custom navigation fast
Users: Combined with something like Userpoints, a list of folks who are active on your site
Access Log entries: find out where users are hitting your site, how they got there, and when

Stats

Learning curve: steep
Depth: incredible, especially once you consider relationships, attachments, AJAX and theme information
Breadth: tons of add-on modules, tons of modules use views internally or add features to this module
See also: simpleviews
Resources:

So, you want to build a content management system? They're all the same, aren't they? Admin screens, RSS feeds, Calendar, Contact form, the list goes on...

On the other hand, that makes me think of one area no framework agrees on... Lists! Drupal doesn't even have a built-in way of displaying a list of all nodes of type "X" to users.

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