I'm sure there are great arguments for starting out with nothing but core modules, and I'm sure there are even better arguments for every installation having all 32 of your favorites. This post, however, will outline a handful of modules to extend a basic Drupal 6.10 package into something that ought to have everything a client's website will need. This includes hands-free SEO, dynamic blogging capabilities, URLs-that-make-sense, and a handful of others. This is ideal, in this designers opinion, for most website needs.

What kind of site would this be? Well, clients of mine range from bands, stores, software developers, service industries, etc. Their online needs range from product announcement and sales, new services, press releases, documentation, art or photo galleries, and much more. Most of these things fall into the same category of "create content" (that's where Drupal is handy). Clients can create new stories for the front page, new products with attached photos, setup new gigs for their band's shows, etc., all from one easy place. With these added modules, your site will have (with 30 minutes of configuration) SEO with Google, including an automatically updated and submitted sitemap. They will be secure, avoid duplicate content (a quick search will show you just how bad dupe's can be to your SEO), be easy to dynamically update, track visitors and trends, etc. Enough setup, here are the modules. Below you will find links to their project pages @ Drupal.org, as well as a zipped package of the entire 6.10 release with all of these modules and extras already installed.

- Core Distro of Drupal 6.10
- Content Construction Kit - to create custom content types, with as many fields and field types as it needs.
- Custom Breadcrumbs - gives users back-tracking ability. This kind of stuff is very important for creating a solid feel to your site.
- FCKeditor - give your clients (and you) a break. This dynamic editor allows for copy-and-pasting from Word, which your client's will love, and gives the ability to upload and attach images / files to the body of any content.
- Flat Comments - comments deserve the "flat" feel that visitors are used to. This will eliminate confusion (and explanations) with your clients and users.
- Global Redirect - avoid duplicate content (with automatic 403 redirects!).
- Page Title - force page title based upon content.
- Path Auto - paired with Global Redirect and Page Title, this gives you the best combo against duplicate content and helps with navigation and SEO.
- Piwik - killer open-source analytics software, Piwik will show you visitors, stats, trends, visit time length, search engines, keywords, external websites, and more. Heavy ajax has been implemented for fast response and the ability to create pretty pie charts on the fly. While Piwik is a stand-alone PHP/MySQL app, this module gives you visitors and stats right into Drupal.
- Privatemsg - the ability to PM other users is expected.
- Token - dependency (replaces strings with tokens, read the page for info. very cool module.).
- Views - if you haven't used Views, do yourself a favor: spend 2 hours watching tutorials and reading the documentation, then go create some killer views and be amazed at its abilities. Views gives you dynamically updated blocks, pages and feeds. These can be based upon parameters, users, filters, relationships, arguments, etc., for any content in your database.
- Webform - give your clients the ability to create dynamic forms that they may need - surveys, advanced contact forms, service requests, etc.
- XML SiteMap - part of the SEO. Register with Google webmaster tools and then configure XML Sitemap. In 30 minutes or less, you'll have the whole SEO setup running on auto-pilot. Your client's new content will be in the sitemap and submitted to Google as soon as it's created (or at least as soon as cron runs).

If your users need the ability to stream private downloads (downloads which require authentication and hide the true URL), install WebFM as well. I avoid this in default installs because the current integration into Drupal is a bit messy. It's a neat module though.

All of that being said, here's a package containing Drupal 6.10 along with all of the modules mentioned above. It also includes Piwik version 0.2.3 (go ahead and update it if you see a new version, it's still in beta!) and the FCKeditor version 2.6.4. Last, it includes the core themes and one additional theme, Zen. Zen is great out of the box, but also has a starter kit for customizing a basic XHTML / standards compliant theme into your own needs.