It's been a little over a month since Google+ launched, and I've been using it quite a bit during that time. I thought I'd offer my thoughts on the new social media site from Google.

The Bad: Invite-Only

I just want to get this part out of the way first. For a social network to thrive, people need to be able to freely use it and their connections need to be able to freely join. The invite-only atmosphere continues to turn off many new users simply because Google+ is useless without people you know on it.

Yeah, this type of post is so over done. I know. But after doing a couple of Drupal 7 sites (and working on a couple of SaaS solutions that I may be offering later this year), I feel like I need to offer my opinion on what D7 modules you absolutely must have on your website.

Absolute Essentials

First up, we've got the absolute essential contributed modules that you must install. While you can build a Drupal website without these modules, you're really hindering yourself without using these.

If there is a shortcoming in Drupal, its the way the menu system is handled. In this particular case, its that custom ID's for links added via the Menu Attributes module are added to the anchor tag and not the list item tag. While this is great for theming that particular link, it can cause difficulties when using most jQuery scripts to modify the display of your menus since the <li> tags won't have any identification.