Recommended Drupal modules

It's tough coming up with a short list of "recommended Drupal modules", but here it is anyway. We'll probably expand it as time goes on...

DON'T GO LIVE WITHOUT THESE MODULES

codefilter
http://drupal.org/project/codefilter
This is a simple filter module. It handles and php tags so that users can post code without having to worry about escaping with < and >

htmlcorrector
http://drupal.org/project/htmlcorrector
This is a HTML correcting module. The filter scans the input, builds up a list of open tags and closes them when needed. Without this module you can expect to have a front page which is regularly broken by even a single missing tag from any post you put up.

urlfilter
http://drupal.org/project/urlfilter
This is a simple filter module. It automatically converts URLs (http, ftp, email, ...) into hyperlinks.

content moderator
http://drupal.org/project/content_moderator
If your site doesn't require multiple levels of site administrators you can skip this module. The idea of the content_moderator.module is that you can avoid having to hand out the god-like access which "administer nodes" would normally give someone. This module allows you to give only a "moderate nodes" permission to a user role. Users with this permission may see a list of content at /admin/content_moderator. Within this list they can either approve posts to move them out of moderation, or put them into moderation to remove them from public view.

blockcache
http://drupal.org/project/blockcache
This module creates a cached version of each block. Block caching happens separately from page caching and so it will work for logged-in users whether or not page caching is enabled for the site. Cached blocks make just one call to the database and can therefore reduce the overhead required to render blocks that require complex queries and/or calculations such as some Views or Taxonomy-related blocks.

db_maintenance
http://drupal.org/node/41588
DB maintenance performs an OPTIMIZE TABLE query on administrator-selected tables during regular cron.php executions. For MyISAM tables, OPTIMIZE TABLE repairs a table if it has deleted or split rows, sorts table indexes, and updates table statistics. For BDB and InnoDB, OPTIMIZE rebuilds the table. Note, MySQL locks tables during the time OPTIMIZE TABLE is running.

tinymce
http://drupal.org/project/tinymce
This module integrates the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor into a Drupal site for editing site content.

nodewords
http://drupal.org/project/nodewords
This module allows you to autogenerate meta tags for each node. Giving more attention to the important keywords and/or description on some of your nodes allows you to get better search engine positioning (given that you really only provide the keywords which exist in the node body itself, and do not try to lie).

loginmenu
Hide the login block that can be seen by anonymous users and replace it with a less conspicuous link on the navigation menu.

pathauto
http://drupal.org/project/pathauto
The pathauto module automatically generates path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, categories, users) when no explicit alias is provided by the user.

email page
http://drupal.org/project/emailpage
A very simple module that adds an "email this page" link to each node allowing users to quickly email a friend. An email is sent with a link to the node. All email text can be customized.

scheduler
http://drupal.org/project/scheduler
This module allows nodes to be published and unpublished on specified dates. If JSCalendar is enabled (part of the JSTools module), a popup Javascript calendar is used to select the date and time for (un)publishing of nodes, otherwise it defaults to text input.