This post is definitely off-topic, but having used the Drupal platform for the Brightpoint GB Tech Blog for almost a year, I've added a number of modules to the site over that time and in the spirit of the blog, which is to share knowledge, I thought fellow Drupal enthusiasts might be interested in how I've customised the standard Drupal installation.

At the time of writing the site is running Drupal 6.12 on CentOS 5.3 (http://www.centos.org)

For information on how to install Drupal from scratch, read this article - http://blog.brightpointuk.co.uk/drupal

Modules

Drupal Modules are free-to-use add-on features for the Drupal content management system created by the development community. You can view a complete list on the Drupal web site - http://drupal.org/project/Modules

It is important to note, if considering deploying a Drupal-based site, that Drupal 7 is going to include many of these modules in the core installation package by default and will be available "soon".

Path Redirect

This module allows you to create URL aliases for all articles and posts so that an address of "/node/12" is automatically redirected to "/my_post_about_stuff"

Path Auto

This module allows you to create post URL aliases automatically when articles are created based on the title

Global Redirect

This module ties into the above two modules but is very important from a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) perspective. By creating an alias for all articles (ie, "http://(site)/node/1" also equals "http://(site)/my_article_about_stuff") can cause some search engines to penalise what they view as duplicate content. What this module does is to set all aliases to permanent redirects using the HTTP 301 code therefore effectively telling search engines to ignore the "/node/1" address.

XML Sitemap

This is a very useful module that creates a "sitemap.xml" file in the root directory of the web site. This file essentially automatically stores the top-level directory of the site and makes it accessible to search engines in a format that they can easily process.

Search 404

This is one of my favourite modules and makes your site that much more user-friendly. What this module does is to present a customised "404" error page to visitors. The 404 page is the "page cannot be found" page displayed to browsers when they enter a URL that does not (or no longer) exists. Rather than simply displaying an error message to visitors it takes the text that they have entered and performs a search using that information. Visitors are then presented with a page saying "this page cannot be found...but these may be of interest to you". Excellent module.

Advanced Taxonomy Blocks (requires JQuery menu)

If you have the Taxonomy core module enabled that enables you to assign vocabulary tags to articles (distinct from meta tags), this block enables you to allow visitors to search for and group articles by those keywords (see the left-hand menu on this blog site for an example).

GCal Events

Allows you to display events from a Google calendar.

AddtoAny

Allows you to add articles to your Favourites, email articles or share articles via common services such as Delicious, Digg, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Backup and Migrate

This is a very useful tool for the administrator that enables you to export the entire mySQL database and restore it to either the same or another Drupal installation. I have used this a number o times when moving the blog between servers. You still need to copy the image and module files across, but restoring he database is simplicity itself.

Twitter

Allows you to automatically post new articles to Twitter.

Collapsiblock (requires Javascript tools and JQuery Update)

Allows you to make navigation blocks 'collapsible' to save on screen space if desired.

Fivestar (requires Voting API)

Allows visitors to vote on articles using a star system.