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Thursday 29 August 2013

Drupal 7 modules: The bare necessities

A while ago we wrote about the Drupal 6 modules you really need. Since that post a few things have changed, on one hand Drupal 7 has moved a bunch of those modules to its core, while on the other hand some were replaced by better alternatives.
Of course every Drupal site we build has different requirements, which makes our choice of contributed modules unique for every project. Nevertheless here is our current selection of trusted Drupal modules we don't want to miss. The bare necessities, if you will.
Internationalization & Entity translation
Working in a country, that has four officially recognized languages and English being the Internet's lingua franca, we install these modules without thinking anymore. Multilingual solutions have come on leaps and bounds since previous Drupal releases and despite not being perfect yet they make our lives much easier.
Pathauto
Regardless of how much attention you want to give to search engine optimization in a project - getting the basics right is essential. Pathauto enables you to create URL patterns for all entity types. The Pareto principle will thank you.
Views
This is by far the most powerful module in the Drupal ecosystem. Built on the Chaos tool suite (ctools), it gives the full control to display any kind of entity in the manner you want it. No wonder it will be part Drupal 8's core.
Devel
If you are a developer this one can help you out of the odd pickle. It allows you to gather information on what is happening in Drupal's background. Just remember to disable it on productive environments.
Wysiwyg & CKEditor
Until the day arrives where everybody is a HTML wizard, WYSIWYG editors will remain a feature, which just belong to every Drupal installation.
Google Analytics
The quickest and easiest way to make your websites visits quantifiable. You can only manage what you can measure.
Panels
Need a complex layout on the quick? Panels will be your trusted friend. You can define layout templates and define in which contexts they should appear.
Display Suite / Panelizer
Depending on the level of complexity of our brief we will opt for one of these two masters of data display control. Although both have their pros and cons we tend to use Panelizer more often, since it's benefits can be leveraged on large and complex websites.
Rules
An amazing module, built upon the Entity API, which allows you to define workflows and actions while you barely have to write any code. It integrates into many modules witch makes it a powerful and useful resource.
Webforms
You can argue that allowing visitors to create nodes with appropriate field permissions can act a contact forms - we have seen this approach in the wild... In our opinion using the Webforms module is the better option for the majority of use cases where a form is needed. You don't want your content overview screen cluttered with spam that got through Mollom's net, right?
What do you think? What are your bare necessities?

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