Web Development: 11 Essential Drupal Modules
With over 17,000 Drupal modules available to customise your website, here's our pick of 11 essential modules to use on your website or blog.
(This is a basic list, in future blogs we will discuss some advanced modules with examples.)
1. Views
Views let you organise the content of your website in a desired manner. It is a very powerful module and the top most downloaded module in Drupal.
Project page: drupal.org/project/views
2. Ctools
Ctools is used by most of the popular Drupal modules, as it provides a set of assisting APIs for other modules.
Project page: drupal.org/project/ctools
3. Libraries API
Like Ctools libraries is needed by other modules to work. Most third party plugins might need libraries to be installed.
Project page: drupal.org/project/libraries
4. Token
Tokens are patterns that are used side wide in Drupal. This module provides a central API for other modules which use these patterns.
Project page: drupal.org/project/token
5. Pathauto
This module automatically generates a URL alias for all content on the site, so there is no need to manually enter these. The pattern can be set in the pathauto configuration UI, for example, you can have all the books in your website to have patterns like: example.com/books/title
Project page: drupal.org/project/pathauto
6. Webform
Webform module allows you to create questionnaires or forms on your website, which users can submit. The form settings allow for sending customised emails to recipients. The form submissions can also be exported in CSV/XLS formats.
Project page: drupal.org/project/webform
7. Webform2PDF
Webform2PDF is an extension for the webform module, which can be used to generate a PDF document of the submitted values from the webform module.
Project page: drupal.org/project/webform2pdf
8. Entity API
Just like the Libraries and Ctools modules, the entity API extends the Drupal core.
Project page: drupal.org/project/entity
9. Backup and Migrate
This module lets you backup and restore the site’s database via the UI. It is very helpful for scheduling regular backups for your site, which can be email or stored on the server and can also be used to manually backup the site when needed.
Project page: drupal.org/project/backup_migrate
10. Rules
The module allows you to define conditions for executed actions based on certain event on the site.
Project page: drupal.org/project/rules
11. WYSIWYG
Drupal does not a have an inbuilt WYSIWYG editor, but the module allows you to integrate any editor of your choice.
Project page:
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