I created this post to use as a companion piece for a presentation I'm giving at the Philly PHP Meetup's "Drupal Show and Tell" event. I also highly recommend checking out these two podocasts/posts on Lullabot: 50 Drupal Tips and Tricks and Top 40 Projects.
The big three
- CCK - Drupal comes with a few "out-of-the-box" content types - pages, blogs, forums, stories, and books - but these are fairly simple and very restricted without the help of the mighty Content Creation Kit. CCK allows you to create your own custom content types, or add new fields to the core content types. There are many add-ons for CCK that extend Drupal's content without any programing.
- Views - Simply put Views is a list of information, but there really isn't much else simple about this powerful module, accept a simple fact: you cannot build a professional Drupal site without this module.
- Panels 2 - Laying out pages has never been easier or more user friendly. Some designers look down upon this because of Drupal's theming system, but the drag and drop functions and ease of control over various elements make this a must have module.
