Well I agree with Ed AND Senor.
If you look at Snowcovered and take out all the modules that are just jquery plugins repackaged as modules, take out all the really old modules, all the modules that aren't being actively developed anymore (like Enterprise Forms - see Michael G's thread, IndooGrid??, etc.) and what you are left with is about 20 or 30 good modules. So Senor is kind of right.
However, some of those 20 or 30 are really good so I agree with Ed too. Here are some of what I consider good:
- XmodPro and Xmod - You can build a ton of stuff with these modules pretty quickly. (Xmod was so good that I still use it for quick and easy utility stuff - mainly it's If/then abilities and tokens - not using it at all to save to db)
- Anything Ventrian (of course these modules aren't on Snowcovered so not counted in the 20-30)
- Anything Datasprings (albeit a bit expensive)
- DigArticle - Very nice publishing module
- I would agree with Jeff and list the old Active Modules (Active Forum and Active Social) but since their direction has been up in the air for 8 or 10 months and likely to stay that way for another 8 or 10 months it's kind of hard to jump on board and do anything with them.
- The Ultra Media Gallery / EasyDNNGallery battle has been interesting and has produced two very good photo gallery modules.
- Netism Map Extreme module is very powerful and you can do some cool stuff with it IF you can figure it out. Support and documentation is somewhat lacking - at least last I heard.
- Peter's Document Exchange module is serious powerful - if you have an Enterprise application for it.
- Last, I think the modules from Avatar Software have some serious potential. Their Redirect Toolkit lacks just about nothing for a redirect module and I think their My Tokens module (needs a name change) could be very powerful if they had an examples/tutorial library like XmodPro and Dynamic Forms have.
- Opps, can't forget the SVS Google Analytics module can we? :-) I still have it running on one client site!
Unfortunately, I think we'll see more third party developers go the way of Enterprise Forms, Gumbosoft, Active Modules, Smart Thinker, dModules, Falafel, Xepient Solutions, Ucanuse, Ghost Software, KodHedZ, Spohn Software, SoCanI, FrentIT, - I could keep going but you get the idea. The community doesn't have the numbers that Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla have which makes it difficult to price modules where people can afford them and still make money. This was somewhat the case from the get-go but now that DNN is Freemium instead of Open Source the DNN community isn't what it once was. However, I'm sure some of those developers will be able to increase their prices and ride DNN PE train into some enterprise sales and survive that way.