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While upgrading to the latest version of Drupal, I was thinking that it would be nice if the 30 or so "after market" modules that I had installed could be moved out of the (rather cluttered) modules/ directory into a sub directory. Here's one approach I found for doing this, with minimal disruption to the site:

1) mkdir modules/local
2) mv module1.module module2.module module3.module [...] local
3) Reload /admin/modules for each site that runs off of that Drupal installation

The key here is step #3. The act of merely loading the modules page causes the entire modules/ directory to be recursively searched for modules, which are then written to the system table in the database and then displayed on the screen. As soon as that table is rewritten, any attempts to load any of the modules that were moved will cause them to be read from their new location on disk.

This is with Drupal 4.6. Your mileage may vary with other versions.

I've been running Drupal for a few months and I've learned a few tips for interacting with Drupal, as well as a few "gotchas" present in Drupal. I'd like to share them with you in this article. Unless mentioned otherwise, everything in this article applies to Drupal 4.6.5.

I'm a big fan of Drupal, and one of the things I think that makes it great are the add-on modules that you can download and add to your Drupal installation.

That being the case, there are some modules that I consider to be absolutely essential to getting the most out of Drupal. I install these modules on just about any Drupal instance I build so that I can save time when putting the actual content on the site. Here is the list of modules in no particular order: