Must-have Drupal modules for your next project

Drupal Modules has been described time and again as the Swiss army knife of Drupal and aptly so. A Drupal module is a collection of PHP files for Drupal which provides additional functionality to the Core.

Some of the must-have Drupal modules are:

Chaos tool suite: With modules like Views, Panels and Features in it, this suite of tools are used in most Drupal projects. Also known as Ctools, it contains a set of API’s and tools mainly meant for developers, which includes:

• Views:One of the most important modules of Drupal. It is used to create, manage and display lists of contents. Views will be part of the core in Drupal 8.
• Panels:It is a drag and drop content manager that lets you visually design a layout and place content within that layout.
• Webform:Lets you add custom forms to your site. An alternative would be to use Entity forms module because it can be integrated with a lot of other modules.
• Context: This module allows you to trigger contextual reactions to different portions of your site.

Token: These are text bits that are inserted into other documents using simple placeholders, like %site name or [user]. Some modules that use tokens via the API are Pathauto, E-commerce, Comment Notify and Google Analytics.

Pathauto: This module helps the user by automatically generating the path for various types of content like nodes, taxonomy, users and terms by using tokens. It allows you to have URL aliases such as /author/node-title instead of /node/123.

Libraries API: A necessity for all Drupal modules /profiles/themes that integrate with externally developed and distributed libraries. Some examples of external libraries are third party jQuery plugin, CSS libraries or PHP libraries.

Google Analytics: This is a Business Intelligence tool. According to Google,” Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features let you see and analyse your traffic data in an entirely new way.”

Backup and Migrate: This module makes it easier to do manual backups, scheduled automatic backups of your Drupal MySQL database, code, files and for migrating a site between environments. You can also easily roll back your Drupal website to a particular point in time using this module.

WYSIWYG: “What You See Is What You Get”. This module allows client-side editors to edit content. This module provides an abstraction layer for other Drupal modules to integrate with any editor.

Spam prevention module: Some of the modules that deal with spam bots are:

• reCAPTCHA:Module integrated with the Google reCAPTCHA service
• Spamicide:To prevent spam submission to forms.
• Honeypot: Uses a hidden form field.
• Mollom: A paid service against spam bots.
• Anti bot: A light weight module needing JavaScript enablement.

Admin menu: A theme-independent administration interface for site administrators, developers and site builders.

XML sitemap: This module helps search engines keep their results up-to-date by crawling intelligently.

Since all the modules are well-documented by the Drupal community, the integration of the modules in to your project is made easier.

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