I was hesitant at first, but now I admit it… I am a big fan of Drupal. What I love most are the modules available for it, which makes configuring and managing websites much easier. After a lot of experimentation, I want to share what I think are some essential Drupal modules worth trying. The list below are just some of the many Drupal Modules available to us:
(descriptions came from the Drupal Module pages)
So… have you ever used the Primary and Secondary links feature on your theme and wondered “how the hell do I display any menu items deeper than that?”
Well, that’s what this module does. It provides configurable blocks of menu trees starting with any level of any menu. And more!
So if you’re only using your theme’s Primary links feature, you can add and configure a “Primary links (levels 2+)” block. That block would appear once you were on one of the Primary links’ pages and would show the menu tree for the 2nd level (and deeper) of your Primary links menu and would expand as you traversed down the tree. You can also limit the depth of the menu’s tree (e.g. “Primary links (levels 2-3)”) and/or expand all the child sub-menus (e.g. “Primary links (expanded levels 2+)”).
With protected node module the users can restrict the access to a node accessible only with a password they provided when the node was created. On node creation you can set a node protected, supply a password and verify strength of the password(via JavaScript).
If somebody wants to view the node or download an attachment of the node, will be redirected to a password query. If password is right, the user will be redirected to the originally accessed page. Authorization is stored in session, so don’t have to enter the password over and over again if once it was provided right.
This module started out as a simple means of configuring the display of the advance search form. A few features have been added since thanks to the contributions of others.
In simple use cases the search_config module allows site admins to decide which fields to display on the advanced search form when enabled. This does not stop astute users from entering the search criteria directly into the search text fields. There is also the option of selecting which node types not to index. Once selected they are also automatically removed from the advance search form. This gives more control over the content that can be searched to those who need it.
This module adds a webform nodetype to your Drupal site. Typical uses for Webform are questionnaires, contact or request/register forms, surveys, polls or a front end to issues tracking systems.
Submissions from a webform are saved in a database table and can optionally be mailed to a nominated e-mail address upon submission. Past submissions are viewable for users with the correct permissions.
Webform includes some simple statistical tools to help in form design and evaluation and also allows the whole table to be downloaded as a csv file for detailed statistical analysis.
Privatemsg allows your site’s visitors to send private messages to each other. Perfect for community oriented sites, such as forums and social networking sites.
Current features
- send and receive private messages on a site (between multiple recipients);
- threaded conversations (make it easier to keep track of messages and replies);
- search private messages;
- tagging and filtering (helps organise conversations);
- user blocking;
- e-mail notifications of new messages;
This module allows you to generate the following printer-friendly versions of any node:
- Printer-friendly version (webpage format) (at
www.example.com/print/nid)
- PDF version (at
www.example.com/printpdf/nid)
- Send by-email (at
www.example.com/printmail/nid)
where nid is the node id of content to render.
A CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test most often placed within web forms to determine whether the user is human. The purpose of CAPTCHA is to block form submissions by spambots, which are automated scripts that post spam content everywhere they can.
The CAPTCHA Pack module contains several CAPTCHA types for use with the CAPTCHA module. The CAPTCHA Pack module is meant to provide lightweight, yet effective alternatives for the traditional image CAPTCHA, which is undesirable in certain situation (e.g. bandwidth restrictions, cpu restrictions, accessibility constraints, etc).
The module allows you to add the following statistics features to your site:
- Selectively track certain users, roles and pages
- Monitor what type of links are tracked (downloads, outgoing and mailto)
- Monitor what files are downloaded from your pages
- Cache the Google Analytics code on your local server for improved page loading times
- Track user segmentation from Drupal profile data
- Site Search support
- AdSense support
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.
Conclusion
By all means, this is far from listing all the excellent Drupal modules out there. Do you have any to share? Please post them here!
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