Over the years, I’ve experienced many times where developers tend to underthink the utility of workflow of the clients to the point where their singular focus of features leads them to dismiss or entirely forget about the needs of the interface workflow, i.e. the ability of the client to easily search, find and use the content in their system. This is something easy to overlook when you’re focusing on the larger tasks at hand and, arguably, are picked up by an IA or designer, depending on how much effort is being spent on profiling admin requirements.
Drupal offers a powerful alternative to any CMS. However, once configured and you’re down the development road for several weeks or months, many of the beneficial features that are simple to implement in the beginning become complex as the build progresses, often slowing development down to a crawl due to schema updates required by the new modules, etc. Here is a list of what I think all base Drupal installations should have, in no particular order. It may include items that are off topic as this is a work in progress – I add stuff I realize or find over time.
Please add suggestions in the comments!
- LAMP
Decide your server time and offset. Make sure both your Web and DB server are set to the same time and are kept synchronized - CKEditor and CKFinder
- Views Bulk Operations
http://www.wdtutorials.com/drupal-7/drupal-tutorial-how-to-bulk-update-fields#.VWReak9VjPw
- IMCE
- Content Cloning
Simple: https://www.drupal.org/project/node_clone
Advanced: https://www.drupal.org/project/replicate - Devel Module
https://www.drupal.org/project/devel - Media
Make sure that you do not use Drupal’s standard media interface for finding media. It is woefully inadequate for anything over a few files. In addition, it does not have folders, etc. Adding this later is a miserable experience. Add it in the beginning. You will need to plan it’s implementation as it is not just plug and play.
https://www.drupal.org/project/media
https://www.drupal.org/project/media_library - Do not use @import for you files. Use link instead, or cache CSS. This is arguable. YMMV.
- XMLSitemap and related modules for great flexibility on what goes into the sitemap, how, and when.
- Is there a module that allows installing sitemap workflow? For example, automatically update sitemap.xml when content is unpublished.
- Google Analytics
- Noindex https://www.drupal.org/project/node_noindex
- Other SEO and content managment tools
- Multiple publisher module
- URL Shortener https://www.drupal.org/project/shurly
- RobotsTxt – use this to help manage your robots.txt file, e.g. add an entry to disallow a search engine from indexing a page, folder, etc https://www.drupal.org/project/robotstxt
Other useful links:
- Bulk udpating records
http://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2012/11/batch-updating-drupal-7-field-data/