My Drupal Arsenal

I use the following plugins on every base installation, since it covers (most) of my client’s needs. The * indicates, that this is a plugin which is active on basically every installation. Also, I only run “real” CRON tasks via cPanel options – no virtual CRON triggers. Additionally, I have a test installation which is the only install to check for updates and has all plugins enabled to do so. This installation is also used for testing possible version conflicts between plugins (which, well, happens).

here we go:

• Administration menu *
• Advanced help *
• Advanced User
• Automatic Nodetitles
• Backup and Migrate *
• Better Formats
• Content Templates (Contemplate)
• Content Construction Kit (CCK)
• Content Access
• Content Taxonomy
• Chaos tool suite
• Date
• DB Maintenance *
• Email Field
• Feed Path Publisher
• FileField
• Flexifilter
• Google Analytics *
• Internationalization
• Image
• ImageAPI
• ImageField
• Image Assist *
• Integrated Metatags *
• jCarousel
• jQuery Update
• Lightbox2
• Link
• Menu Access
• Node form columns *
• Panels
• Pathauto *
• Select translation
• Signwriter
• Site map *
• Textile
• Token
• Transliteration
• Views
• Views Bonus Pack
• Views carousel
• Webform *
• Wysiwyg *
• Wysiwyg API template plugin
• XML sitemap

Of course, which plugins I need heavily depends on the project’s scope. But this way, I have  a standardised installation which can cover really a lot of different applications, keeps itself clean and safe (automated nightly DB cleanups and backups/dumps to a local server directory via CRON – files are on RAID 5 + daily backup anyways) and is easily upgradable with a simple automator script which uses the Transmit FTP client to mirror the module directory of each installment with my tested and verified local repository. If there’s a Drupal core-update, I mirror all changed files over the whole site (excluding the user generated directories, configs, etc.).