Drupal Modules

Thursday, 05 April 2012

I recently completed a project for a customer that afforded me the opportunity to dive into Drupal on better terms. On my first introduction to the software several years back (and Joomla for that matter) I determined I would be able to use my cross-browser theming skills more effectively if I chose WordPress as a base CMS.

This time around I was able to spend a considerable chunk of time reading the documentation (especially around the Theming Guide) and examples on other’s sites. Some topics online seemed incomplete so I did end up reviewing some chapters in a few books on Drupal 7 in particular. In my mind it seems like the developers of WordPress and Drupal are migrating toward each other in feature sets, but delivering solutions from different perspectives.

WordPress appears to be geared more toward out of the box social publishing, with an easy installer, and an easy updater. It can be pushed in almost any direction, but doesn’t seem to be the goal of the software creators. Drupal on the other hand feels more like a collection of building blocks for a web database. While Drupal has fields, blocks, regions, views, and fine grained permissions with roles… URL aliases require a module to automate their selection. There’s even a module to hook up Filemaker Pro and Drupal.

Back to the modules:

I utilized the following:

For spam free contact forms (almost):

• captcha
• webform

For easy page editing:

• ckeditor
• pathauto
• imce

For dynamic content:

• page_title
• token
• views

For development and style:

• devel_themer
• nice_menus