Wysiwyg

The WYSIWYG module is my favorite for rich text editing in Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. (In Drupal 8, WYSIWYG is in core.) Here's how I set it up.

Display Suite

Provides some advanced layout and display options for content. "Display Suite is a module that takes over the rendering of entities."

Better Formats

The best part about this module is that each role can have a default text format.

Drupal 7 core allows for reordering the formats in the UI, thus picking a default too. However, there is no role based ordering, as there is with the Better Formats module.