As a Web Developer here at Forum One, I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of modules in the Drupal Community. Some modules I've used are great and make working with Drupal a dream, others... not so much. I'd like to use this blog entry to focus on the must have modules I use on nearly all my Drupal projects. First off, you should know that I almost always start with Acquia's packaged distribution of Drupal called Acquia Drupal.

Panels is one of those Drupal modules that engenders a range of feelings around here.  Some people love it -- interface configurable layout! -- and some hate it -- difficult to manage .5em gutters.  But it, and Chaos Tools which it is based on, provide a great deal of useful functionality.  The problem is there is very little documentation on how to extend it beyond what's distributed in code.  The basics of extending Panels/CTools is pretty easy, you just implement the hook_ctools_plugin_directory to tell it where to look for your files, e.g.

WordPress 2.9 is ramping up support for custom post types. It's an improvement, but not nearly as exciting as you've probably been led to believe.

For starters, what is a custom post type in WordPress?