The Drupal CMS (Content Management System) is a great base for any kind of site. You can use it to start a blog, an e-commerce site, a membership site, a forum – anything you want, really. There are hundreds of modules available and the simplicity an openness of the code makes it very easy to create your own modules and functions.

The CMS is easy to update and is quite stable, the only current drawback being that the themes are a bit on the ugly side, due to the coding method being a mix of programmer and designer languages, and not separate as on other platforms like Joomla. Creating your own theme is the only way to get it right, as there are few free and good themes available. But this problem is slowly becoming a thing of the past, as more and more design companies come up with great, cheap or even free Drupal themes that can be easily customized and used for any number of projects.

Views. It is almost impossible to create a good, multi-functional site in Drupal without this module. Traditionally, Drupal has hard-coded the way nodes, categories, lists and tables are presented, and this module allows you to change them however you want. You’ll need it for almost any task – from creating a more customized front page (including personalized home pages for different users) to providing different views of your articles and displaying all sorts of lists, summaries and blocks.

WYSIWYG. By default, Drupal does not come with an integrated WYSIWYG (or visual) editor. You have to install one manually or edit all the pages by inserting all the needed code and tags by yourself. This is terribly inconvenient, hard and slow even if you’re an experienced programmer. The WYSIWYG module allows you to use any visual editor you like (for example, TinyMCE or FCKEditor) and is very easy to install and start using.

CAPTCHA. With the number of spam online nowadays, you absolutely must have some sort of protection, or your site will be overrun with thousands or spammy comments, trackbacks and links, which is very bad for your ranking and user experience. Captcha is a very common and efficient method of protection, and this module will allow you to integrate it on your Drupal site. The module is constantly updated, so any software that manages to crack the captcha will quickly be rendered obsolete and inoperable, provided you update your modules regularly.

Bad Behavior. This module is another type of defense against spammers and hackers. It acts a lot like a firewall, scanning incoming requests and denying those that seem suspicious (coming from known spammer IP’s or through proxies, for example). You can set the level of sensitivity (setting it too high can lead to normal users being denied access and a high server load, so you’ll have to find the best setting for your site). It’s a must have module for any site, and along with the above Captcha module, it will filter 99% of all spam (the remaining 1% being spam comments from real people hired to do that).

XML Sitemap. This module is an indispensable tool for SEO. It gives you the possibility to create sitemaps (automatically or manually) for search engines to index. Creating sitemaps ensures that the SE’s will index all of your pages, and do it correctly. It is really a must have, especially if you have a lot of pages and nodes published and linked all over your site.

The above modules (that’s the right word for plug-ins or extensions in the Drupal community) are must have for almost any website, and you don’t have to worry about them being incompatible – they’re 95% compatible with any other modules you might have, and if one of them doesn’t work, you can just delete it via FTP and the site will resume normal operation, nothing will be changed.