10 Essential Drupal Modules for your Next Development Project

As experts in Drupal Commerce development, we’ve come across hundreds of fantastic Drupal modules across many of our web development projects at iSOS, some of which we wouldn’t even consider taking on a new project without. This is one of the reasons Drupal, as a CMS, stands out against competitors such as WordPress. The level of choice is staggering, providing unended capabilities for a project, with each distinct module makes the process of developing and updating a Drupal website that much more intuitive and simple.

Over the years, we’ve found Drupal rewards website builders with a unique flexibility that’s hard to come by. Modules are a big part of creating the experience you want in a development project, and there’s a module for almost every requirement, but today we’ll be exploring the cream of the crop. Take a look at our work to see some of these helpful modules in practice.

Backup and Migrate

For almost every web developer, access to backup and migration capabilities is essential. The Backup and Migrate module adds this functionality to every Drupal project you start, and whilst this functionality doesn’t exist in the most commonly-used Drupal versions, this particular module is free and easy to use, allowing you to automatically backup your site or schedule backups at your convenience.

Google Analytics

Analytical insights are an important part of maintaining a website’s success, and no tool is more widely used than Google’s own Analytics. The module not only allows you to integrate your Drupal website with ease, but also add goal and event tracking across your site without the need for tracking codes. This is an excellent, functional version of Analytics that can even potentially help new users get to grips fairly quickly with basic features.

Webform

As the title suggests, Webform allows for the intuitive creation of almost any kind of custom web form. The most common application is contact forms, but it can also create quizzes, surveys, competitions with great ease. This all allows for enough flexibility to be pertinent to almost any user facing interaction customer-side.

Pathauto

SEO-friendly URLs are as important nowadays as they’ve ever been. Drupal has URL aliasing as a built-in feature, but Pathauto takes things to the next level. It allows content editors to set up rules for URL aliases to be automatically created for content, taxonomy terms, user profiles, etc. This creates a consistent, reliable URL structure for a Drupal site. It can update pattern-based aliases in bulk, and when combined with other modules (e.g. Global Redirect), will even take care of maintaining search engine friendly redirects without the need for admin involvement.

Botcha

Taking its name from a blend of “Bot” and “CAPTCHA”, Botcha spam prevention, is the next line of defence against spam and nuisance robots. Ironically, its purpose is actually to replace CAPTCHA, rather than extend or augment it. It provides a sophisticated UI and sets of rules for enabling users to skip past intrusive “are you a human” checks, while tricking bots into proving that they’re not.

Twitter Block

A very commonly used module which pulls a designated Twitter stream and embeds it onto a website. Social is now a hugely important part of keeping user engagement across a website and beyond, and a Twitter Block enabled feed will not only get people following you more on these channels, but also add extra content that you may not always want displayed permanently on a homepage or landing page.

Drupal Commerce

For an eCommerce development site build, Drupal Commerce is a welcome tool that covers every aspect of the online payment process. Few modules offer an all-in-one solution for shopping cart creation, but with Drupal Commerce, you can optimise the overall shopping process whilst adding custom features for carts, promotions, multi-currency payment options and data capture to top it all off.

Rules

Rules is a powerful Drupal module which helps developers define certain, and often very specific, conditions for actions to occur across a website. This includes page redirections, mailto buttons, promotional codes and even analytical insights to be provided by the module, allowing for the creation of a much more tailored user experience.

CKEditor

This module allows Drupal to replace all regular text area fields with a more comprehensive visual HTML editor, for both external and internal use. The module also brings many useful features commonly found in word processors, in a WYSIWYG markup view, all for web usage. Existing Drupal editors are basic, so if you want more capabilities in a simpler and streamlined view, you should definitely consider CKEditor.

IMCE

For an image centric website, managing and maintaining several-hundred image files in various formats can become increasingly difficult. IMCE is a image management module, uploader, and a browser that makes visual content management inexplicably easier. IMCE can also define image usage for users across a website, such as limiting file size, dimensions and upload speed for any relevant user interactions.

Thanks for Reading

If you’re interested in the potential of a Drupal website for your business, whether it’s optimising an existing build or starting from scratch, contact us for more information. You can also follow our ongoing work including App development and FileMaker databases on our website to see more of our expertise in action.