10 Interesting Drupal Modules
Drupal is lucky to benefit from a very active community of developers meaning that there is a wide and varied range of contributed modules to extend the functionality of Drupal core. In this article we’ll take a quick look at 10 interesting contributed modules; some are well known whilst others are a little bit more obscure.
1. Admin menu (D7) / Admin toolbar (D8)
Out of the box the Drupal admin interface can be a bit unwieldy and whilst this has been significantly improved over the years, especially with the advent of Drupal 8, there’s still room for improvement. Enter admin_menu or admin_toolbar (for Drupal 8) which are two similar modules to make navigating the admin interface a whole lot easier by providing a neat little toolbar with drop downs so you can navigate the whole admin interface from any page of your site.
2. Kraken
The kraken.io web service can be used to optimise images on your website. It reduces image size by around 50%, whilst maintaining visual quality - even up close, we can't tell the difference between a Kraken'd image and the original! The Kraken module for Drupal works by exposing an image style effect through the ImageAPI Optimize module which can be applied to image styles on your Drupal website.
3. Popup field group
This is a nice little module produced by ComputerMinds which gives the option to display the children of a field group in a popup overlay. Buttons are exposed to toggle the popup.
4. Flood unblock
Drupal 7 introduced a feature to prevent brute force attacks meaning that no more than five failed login attempts per user in any six hour period or no more than 50 failed attempts from an IP address in a one hour period are allowed. Failed login attempts are recorded in the flood table. This flood unblock module provides a user interface for administrators to easily unblock users that have exceeded these limits.
5. Paragraphs
Paragraphs give much greater control over content creation on your Drupal site. A paragraph is a set of fields which has its own theme associated with it to give much greater flexibility over how content gets rendered on your site. So for example you might have a paragraph which floats an image left and displays text on the right - the possibilities are endless. Take a look at tiles in action to find out more about working with paragraphs (we use the term tiles to mean the same thing!)
6. Stage file proxy
This module is useful when working on a development version of your Drupal site by providing a proxy to the production site’s files directory. When you need a production file the module maps this the production files directory and downloads it to your development files directory.
7. Field display label
This is a nice little module to allow you to change a field label on the edit form so that it’s difference to what’s rendered when the field is displayed. So for example you might have a name field labelled ‘what’s your name?’ on the edit form which just renders ‘name’ when it’s displayed.
8. Custom_add_another
Another simple module maintained by us at ComputerMinds which gives site admins the ability to customise the ‘add another’ text for multi valued fields.
9. Notice_killer
This is a nice little module that will split out PHP notices and warnings from other messages logged by Drupal and also logs a bit more information about each so that you can track them down and fix them more easily.
10. Rabbit_hole
This is a useful module that prevents certain entities from being viewable on their own page. So for example if you have an image content type which you never want to be accessible on node/xx then this is the module for you!