My last two posts related to Drupal so I thought I would continue the trend but take a few steps back and firstly explain what Drupal is, some tools and requirements you need to start developing your own Drupal site, and also some of the must have modules to download.

Drupal has been around for years and in my experience with the likes of Mambo, Postnuke and Joomla, I believe Drupal is the easiest to use, maintain and expandable content management system available. With huge backing and developer support, there is a vast array of modules, code snippets and Drupal resources to help a first time Drupal developer all the way up to the experienced.

ireckon Drupal is

Written in PHP, Drupal is open-source software that can work on various operating systems like Windows, MAC OS X and Linux. Being open-source, this enables developers to use, change, improve the software and develop/update modules without as they see fit, which creates a community of users and developers that help each other to better use and understand Drupal.

ireckon you'll need

- Either an Apache or Microsoft IIS Web server.
- PHP version 4.3.5 or higher (5.2 is recommended)
- MySQL 4.1 or 5.0
*Note: Requirements will differ depending on what version of Drupal you use (ie 5, 6 or 7). Please click here for a more detailed run down of the requirements for Drupal.

ireckon these tools are handy

You will need to be able to FTP your Drupal base, additional modules and files to your hosting. I'd recommend using FireFTP (a firefox extension) or FileZilla but there are a number of other free FTP client programs available. Once you have successfully installed Drupal you most likely will need to edit your files, I use EditPlus but again, there are others programs available which just comes down to preference.

Web Browser wise, I do recommend using Mozilla Firefox whilst theming, editing or updating your Drupal site. I say this because the extension Firebug for Firefox is an excellent tool in expecting the HTML of your page and manipulating the HTML and CSS on the fly. It wont save what you do but allows you to tweak the site with a few changes right before your eyes which is a huge time saver.

ireckon these are 10 must have modules (no particular order)

1. WYSIWYG API
WYSIWYG API allows to use client-side editors (a.k.a. WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editors) for editing content. It simplifies installation of editors and allows you to define which editor to use depending on the input format. In short, when editing your content, you get a bunch of buttons to format the text, ie. Bold, italics, align, tables etc. etc.

2. Views
Create custom page or block content based on a wide variety of settings. Eg. Create a page that displays only news story's and control how and what information to show on that page.

3. CCK
Content Construction Kit. This is needed to be able to create your own content types. There are a number of extra fields you can add to the kit to use in your content types, the most useful ones being Date, E-mail, Filefield and Imagefield.

4. Pathauto
Automatically creates custom URLs for users and different node types. Very useful for example if you want to generate URLs for a content type that uses the date the node was created.

5. Token
This is used behind the scene in Drupal and does not provide any visible functions to the user on its own. Tokens are small bits of text that can be placed into larger documents via simple placeholders, like %site-name or [user]. The Token module provides a central API for modules to use these tokens, and expose their own token values. It is an essential module to allow some other modules to function.

6. IMCE
IMCE is an image/file uploader and browser that supports personal directories and quota. Requires a text editor such as FCKEditor, TinyMCE, WYMEditor, Whizzywig etc. Allows you to to browse, upload and insert an image or file into a text area without the use of you writing HTML.

7. Webform
Create your own custom forms like contact forms, feedback forms and subscription forms without any programming. Great for the novice user.

8. Poormanscron
A module which runs the Drupal cron operations without needing the cron application. Useful if you don't have access through your hosting to set up your own cron run times.

9. ImageCache
Allows you to set up presets for image processing. Scale, crop, resize, desaturate, ... images to use in different views etc.
Requires ImageAPI module *and* one of its toolkits (GD or ImageMagick) and also the Transliteration module

10. Secure Site
Hide your entire site behind a login form. Perfect for staging and development sites to hide them from the public.

ireckon that'll do it. I hope this provides you with some usefull information regarding Drupal and some modules. Please note though, hosting requirements and the modules you will/won't need will depend on the version of Drupal you install, and most importantly, what sort of site you are building. Feel free to comment on what modules you find usefull or not, or any other information you believe should be brought to the attention of a first timer.