(Screenshot: The Jungle Book, 1967. [Film] Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman. USA: Disney)

A while ago we wrote about the Drupal 6 modules you really need. Since that post a few things have changed, on one hand Drupal 7 has moved a bunch of those modules to its core, while on the other hand some were replaced by better alternatives.

Of course every Drupal site we build has different requirements, which makes our choice of contributed modules unique for every project. Nevertheless here is our current selection of trusted Drupal modules we don't want to miss. The bare necessities, if you will.

Internationalization & Entity translation
Working in a country, that has four officially recognized languages and English being the Internet's lingua franca, we install these modules without thinking anymore. Multilingual solutions have come on leaps and bounds since previous Drupal releases and despite not being perfect yet they make our lives much easier.

Pathauto
Regardless of how much attention you want to give to search engine optimization in a project - getting the basics right is essential. Pathauto enables you to create URL patterns for all entity types. The Pareto principle will thank you.

Views
This is by far the most powerful module in the Drupal ecosystem. Built on the Chaos tool suite (ctools), it gives the full control to display any kind of entity in the manner you want it. No wonder it will be part Drupal 8's core.

Devel
If you are a developer this one can help you out of the odd pickle. It allows you to gather information on what is happening in Drupal's background. Just remember to disable it on productive environments.

Wysiwyg & CKEditor
Until the day arrives where everybody is a HTML wizard, WYSIWYG editors will remain a feature, which just belong to every Drupal installation.

Google Analytics
The quickest and easiest way to make your websites visits quantifiable. You can only manage what you can measure.

Panels
Need a complex layout on the quick? Panels will be your trusted friend. You can define layout templates and define in which contexts they should appear.

Display Suite / Panelizer
Depending on the level of complexity of our brief we will opt for one of these two masters of data display control. Although both have their pros and cons we tend to use Panelizer more often, since it's benefits can be leveraged on large and complex websites.

Rules
An amazing module, built upon the Entity API, which allows you to define workflows and actions while you barely have to write any code. It integrates into many modules witch makes it a powerful and useful resource.

Webforms
You can argue that allowing visitors to create nodes with appropriate field permissions can act a contact forms - we have seen this approach in the wild... In our opinion using the Webforms module is the better option for the majority of use cases where a form is needed. You don't want your content overview screen cluttered with spam that got through Mollom's net, right?

What do you think? What are your bare necessities?

(Photo by PierreEmmanuelBOITON)

Last night, again, Web Monday Zurich stopped at the HUB. The 120 seats were gone within minutes - making it the fastest sold-out Web Monday Zurich of all siblings.

The presentations saw Emma Page of Evernote on the process of idea to product at the note taking service. Matthew Perkins and Alex Wimbush introduced the social network Yield Pop, which tries to leverage social media in the agricultural industry. Lukas Brüderlin and Richard Sewell from ic21 presented iCompare. Their service promises to find the best mobile phone deal in Switzerland for you.

Special thanks to Evernote for sponsoring this edition's location and the refreshments.

This week's edition takes a look at the question if openness can scale, Twitter's latest feat and gives Google Reader's former Product Manager a voice. Enjoy!

Drupal

TimOnWeb: 8 Awesome Drupal Snippets I Wish I Knew Before
A few issues ago we featured ​Tim Kamanin's initiative ​Dropbucket.org. In the meantime the Drupal snippet repository has grown and the initiator took a moment to select his eight favourite snippets.

Commerce Guys: Commerce Kickstart - Visualizing the birth of a distro

Commerce Guys' Nicolas Meyer visualized, with the help of Gource and the powers of their software version control tool, the collaborative history of the Drupal Commerce Kickstart distribution.

Technology

The Verge: Twitter gets a patent on... Twitter
In the week Twitter turned seven, the microblogging service made the headlines for different reasons.

Food for thought

Accelerating reinventions: Openness does not scale
Laurent Haug reflects on the experiences he made with the Lift Conference.

Opinion

Quora: Why is Google killing Google Reader?
Question-and-answer service Quora might not be one of the social media platforms which is particularly well known in the mainstream. Nevertheless some interesting answers were provided on last week's hot button issue.

On Saturday the Voice of Switzerland reached its climax. During the live shows our head technology Michael Schmid was present to ensure that the Drupal powered website ran smoothly.

Here are some exclusive behind the scenes shots he made.