Drupal BootCamp Wrap-Up and Our Top 10 Drupal 5 Modules

A few weeks ago, Steve and I organized a Drupal BootCamp here at Bradley University that went very, very well. About 40 people attended. Steve and I tag-teamed the morning sessions on how to get started using Drupal to build a simple website, step-by-step.

The afternoon was spent as an "Ask the Expert" question and answer session where we discussed topics like e-commerce, theming, and multisite configuration. David Needham, a student here at Bradley, covered the e-commerce discussion, focusing specifically on how to use Übercart. Cheryl Boles, a graduating senior here at Bradley (hire her, you won't regret it), gave a great discussion on how to quickly build out a theme for Drupal using the Zen theme as a base. She actually designed and built out the whole theme in just the morning session -- in just about 5 hours total from design to implementation! Larry Garfield from Palantir.net came down to present on how to get into the Drupal community. I discussed how to do multi-site installations and also talked about my experiments in setting up and running the Multi-Site Manager module to control dynamic site instantiation (more on that in another post).

The event was a ton of fun and we think that people had a great time and learned a lot.

As promised here is our list of 10 "must-have" modules for sites we build with Drupal 5:

• Views -- build super powerful listing tools for content
• CCK -- add custom fields to content types to build a logical information architecture
• TinyMCE -- WYSIWYG editor because clients need more than plain text and they don't know HTML
• Panels 2 -- a newcomer to our list; allows for really robust content display control
• XMLSitemap -- a must-have for getting the Google to index your site
• Google Analytics -- for keeping an eye on that traffic
• Global Redirect -- not necessary for Drupal 6, but for Drupal 5 it prevents the doubling of paths when aliased (like node/2 and /about) which can tank a site's search engine friendliness
• Imagecache -- the best way to handle dynamic image resizing / generation when using CCK+ImageField
• Admin Menu -- convenient drop-down menu for administrative users to get to admin pages quickly
• Default Filter -- Set the default input filter for content based on user role