Mon, 11 Jan 2010
/SW/business/Drupal:
My Favorite Drupal Modules
(As of Drupal version 6.x....)
Drupal is a very mature piece of software, with a vast number of
modules to choose from, often with multiple modules vying to provide the
same piece of functionality. After some trial and error, here are my
candidates for "best of", modules someone new to Drupal should look into
early:
First some easily overlooked core modules:
- PHP filter: useful even if you do not know what PHP is (the
language that Drupal happens to be coded in). There are a number of
modules out there promising to "make it easy" to incorporate things like
Youtube videos and Google Adsense ads into your site. You do not need
those modules, because all you need to do to make this happen is to copy
a bit of Javascript from the source site into the editing page for the
node or block where you want the ad or video to appear. Generally
speaking, Drupal will ignore user-entered Javascript, unless you
turn on "PHP code" in the "Input format" section.
- Taxonomy: If you need to organize content into categories,
this is where you go.
- Trigger: On the admin page there is an item called "actions"
where you can define things you want your site to do automatically. And
then under "trigger", you can specify the criteria for when that action
will be taken. For example, this is the mechanism by which my sites send
me an e-mail when a new comment has been posted and I need to take care
of the moderation queue.
Third-Party modules:
- Content Construction Kit (CCK)[1]: one of the modules that
truly sets Drupal apart from the competition. The basic function of CCK
is to allow the user, via the Drupal GUI, to create custom databases
within Drupal. Which is to say, you can add custom fields to any
content, and control read/write access on a per-field basis.
- Views[2]: Views and CCK usually travel in a pair, since Views
allows the user (via Drupal GUI) to construct and display custom queries
of almost any data in the Drupal database. As a very simple example,
Drupal does not come equipped with a comment RSS feed, and one can
easily create such a feed with Views.
- Image[3] / Image FUpload[4]: the image module seems to be the
standard way to add photo upload and management to a Drupal site. The
image module supports bulk uploads via FTP. If you wish to do bulk
upload multiple photos using the Drupal site, add the "Image FUpload"
module.
- Lightbox2[5]: drop this module in for elegant AJAX "lightbox"
displays of photos and galleries. ("Lightbox" refers to a standard
effect where, if you click on a photo in a gallery, the whole page fades
to a dark gray background while a white box pops up in the middle to
display the photo. Delete the box and the background page brightens and
again becomes the foreground.)
- Boost[7]: As a web application Drupal can sometimes be a bit
of a resource hog, particularly if there are a lot of modules installed.
If the host server is a bit light on memory, the result can be
sluggishness. Boost is very simple in concept: pages referenced by
anonymous users are stored in an Apache cache, such that when cached
pages are served up Drupal is taken completely out of the picture: no
PHP or MySQL overhead, your website performs like a static site. Until
the cache expires, of course, and pages have to be regenerated once per
caching period.
Here is someone else's list of favorites[6].
[1] http://drupal.org/project/cck
[2] http://drupal.org/project/views
[3] http://drupal.org/project/image
[4] http://drupal.org/project/image_fupload
[5] http://drupal.org/project/lightbox2
[6] http://www.nicklewis.org/40-essential-drupal-6-modules
[7] http://drupal.org/project/boost
posted at: 03:40 | path: /SW/business/Drupal | permanent link to this entry
