Oct 7, 2011

Must have modules for creating a site in Drupal 7.x

Ctools

This suite is primarily a set of APIs and tools to improve the developer experience. It also contains a module called the Page Manager whose job is to manage pages. In particular it manages panel pages, but as it grows it will be able to manage far more than just Panels.

Custom Breadcrumbs

Allows administrators to set up parametrized breadcrumb trails for any node type. This allows CCK-style node types to have "Home > User Blog > 2005 > January" style breadcrumbs on the node view page itself, synchronizing cleanly with custom views or pathauto aliases. Breadcrumb visibility can be customized via a php snippet.

No new features are planned for these versions, but they are still supported and bug reports are encouraged.

Fivestar

The Fivestar voting module adds a clean, attractive voting widget to nodes in Drupal 5, node and comments in Drupal 6, and any entity in Drupal 7

Panels

The Panels module allows a site administrator to create customized layouts for multiple uses. At its core it is a drag and drop content manager that lets you visually design a layout and place content within that layout. Integration with other systems allows you to create nodes that use this, landing pages that use this, and even override system pages such as taxonomy and the node page so that you can customize the layout of your site with very fine grained permissions.

Pathauto

The Pathauto module automatically generates path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, categories, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows you to get aliases like /category/my-node-title.html instead of /node/123. The aliases are based upon a "pattern" system which the administrator can control.

Porter-Stemmer

This module implements the Porter stemming algorithm to improve English-language searching with the Drupal built-in Search module.

The process of stemming reduces each word in the search index to its basic root or stem (e.g. 'blogging' to 'blog') so that variations on a word ('blogs', 'blogger', 'blogging', 'blog') are considered equivalent when searching. This generally results in more relevant search results.

Rules

The rules modules allows site administrators to define conditionally executed actions based on occurring events (known as reactive or ECA rules).

Token

Tokens are small bits of text that can be placed into larger documents via simple placeholders, like %site-name or [user]. The Token module provides a central API for modules to use these tokens, and expose their own token values.

Views

The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content (nodes in Views 1, almost anything in Views 2) are presented. Traditionally, Drupal has hard-coded most of this, particularly in how taxonomy and tracker lists are formatted.

This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. It has four modes, plus a special mode, and provides an impressive amount of functionality from these modes.

Among other things, Views can be used to generate reports, create summaries, and display collections of images and other content.

Webform

Webform is the module for making surveys in Drupal. After a submission, users may be sent an e-mail "receipt" as well as sending a notification to administrators. Results can be exported into Excel or other spreadsheet applications. Webform also provides some basic statistical review and has and extensive API for expanding its features.

2 comments :

  1. What about the CCK module that is not mentioned in the post?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Cuberellis this post is for Drupal 7.x, where CCK is now in the core of Drupal 7.x

    ReplyDelete