Drupal Modules for Site Builders

Feargal O'Kane

Developer @ BT48

feargal@BT48.com

Drupal Modules

Contributed modules allow you to tap into the work of other projects and use them for your own project.

Drupal's greatest strength and what first attracted me to the platform

Choosing the "right" module

  • No single 'right' way to do something
  • Lots of wrong ways
  • Experience and trial and error
  • Some of our 'base' modules

The right way:

For that project

at that budget

in that timescale

BT48 Approach

Flexibility

Adaptability

Ease of Use

Views

The bedrock of all our sites.

SITE STRUCTURE

Couldn't build a site without it

https://www.drupal.org/project/views

Context

We choose this approach for the vast majority of our projects:

  • consistent
  • ties in with our IA approach
  • we know what we can and can't do easily with it
  • YMMV

Panels

We have used Panels in the past and have used it on some recent projects:

  • very flexible
  • potentially powerful
  • when the use case requires it then we are happy to use it

SITE STRUCTURE

VS

Context

https://www.drupal.org/project/context

Build your site in 'sections'

Sections controlled by conditions

Display blocks, hide regions, set menu & breadcrumbs, theme HTML...

Panels

https://www.drupal.org/project/panels

Build your site in 'sections'

Sections controlled by conditions

Display blocks, hide regions, set menu & breadcrumbs, theme HTML...

Editor can have control over layouts

site building

Display Suite

https://www.drupal.org/project/ds

Control how your content is displayed using a drag and drop interface.

Arrange your layouts without having to work your way through dozens of template files. 

 

Consistent layout for content across the site

Custom view modes allow control over different layouts such as teaser lists, search results, the full node, views etc.

EVA

https://www.drupal.org/project/EVA

Provides a Views display plugin

Allows the output of a View to be attached to the content of any Drupal entity.

FIELDS

Field Group

https://www.drupal.org/project/field_group

Add fields into groups

Fieldgroup comes with default HTML wrappers like:

- vertical tabs,

- horizontal tabs,

- accordions,

- fieldsets or

- div wrappers.

Linked field

https://www.drupal.org/project/linked_field

Linked Field allows you to link fields in the field formatter settings. 

For example - have a content type with an image and a link field and you want to link the image to the entered link.

No need for code - control through the GUI

MEDIA

oembed

https://www.drupal.org/project/oembed

Allow your Drupal site to embed content from oEmbed-providers

Add media by pasting link:

YouTube
Vimeo
Soundcloud
Amazon

flexslider

https://www.drupal.org/project/flexslider

Integrates the Flex Slider library with Drupal to build responsive, resizable slideshows. 

The slideshows automatically adapt to the size of the browser window or device.

- Touch enabled navigation

- Keyboard navigation

- Configurable slide animation

fitvids

https://www.drupal.org/project/fitvids

If you have a responsive website and you want to embed video and other <iframe> content, then you need this module.

It uses the FitVids.js library for fluid width video embeds (e.g. flash video in <iframe>s).

You don't need it for pure HTML5 videos.

SEO

METAtag

https://www.drupal.org/project/metatag

Automatically provide structured metadata about a website. 

More than the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag 

Provides support for meta tags that allow control of how content appears when shared on social networks.

Open Graph Protocol from Facebook, Twitter Cards from Twitter

XML Sitemap

https://www.drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap

Creates a sitemap that conforms to the sitemaps.org specification

Helps search engines to more intelligently crawl a website and keep their results up to date. 

The sitemap created by the module can be automatically submitted to Google, Bing and Yahoo! 

Can add sitemap links for content, menu items, taxonomy terms, and user profiles.

GEO

ADDRESSFIELD

Geocoder

geofield

Leaflet/Openlayers

SPAM

antibot

https://www.drupal.org/project/antibot

Designed to eliminate robotic form submissions on your website in an innovative-fashion. 

The module works completely behind the scenes and doesn't require any interaction from the user. 

The only requirement to the end user is that they must have Javascript enabled. If they do not, the protected forms will be hidden and a message will appear, telling the user that the form requires Javascript be enabled in order to use it.

honeypot

https://www.drupal.org/project/honeypot

Inserts a hidden form field to forms with a field name like 'homepage'. 

End users don't see the field, so they don't fill it out. But spam bots (usually using prewritten scripts) do see the field (usually), and add something to it. 

The Honeypot module detects this and blocks the form submission if there's something in the field.

MAIL

smtp

https://www.drupal.org/project/smtp

This module allows Drupal to bypass the PHP mail() function and send email directly to an SMTP server. The module supports SMTP authentication and can even connect to servers using SSL if supported by PHP.

mailsystem

https://www.drupal.org/project/mailsystem

Provides an Administrative UI and Developers API for safely updating the mail_system configuration variable.

Allows certain mail to be sent as HTML, other as plain text

mimemail

https://www.drupal.org/project/mimemail

Allows users to receive HTML email and can be used by other modules.

Adopts your site's style by automatically including your theme's stylesheet files in a themable HTML message format

If prefers plaintext, the HTML will be converted to plain text and sent as-is. 

Questions?

opinions?

Alternatives?

Feargal O'Kane

feargal@BT48.com

Open Days 2015

By Feargal O'Kane

Open Days 2015

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