Top 15 Drupal Modules You Need for Site Building

With millions of successful users globally, Drupal is an open-source CMS platform that small-to-large organizations can use with low cost of implementation, robust architecture ready for the enterprise and without fear of vendor lock-in.

It is highly feasible for digital innovation, speed of implementation, and scalability. It comes with a good collection of corporate themes and many modules for easy creation and maintenance of websites. Companies find these modules effective and efficient when creating their websites.

Let’s look at the top 15 contributed modules that are essential for administrators who want to enhance the capabilities of their website.

Drupal Modules list guarantees you a website that:

• Has easy integration with popular third-party services and apps.
• Will be interactive and visually appealing for users to hang on, communicate with, shop on, network, etc.
• Is accessible for content managers and admins to handle efficiently.

Figure: List of Drupal Modules Development

Diving into the list of Top Drupal Modules

1. Admin Toolbar:
The Admin Toolbar module tends to upgrade the default Toolbar to convert it into a drop-down menu, providing quick access to all administration pages. It works at the tip of the default toolbar core module.

The Admin Toolbar has various sub-modules like

• Admin Toolbar Extra Tools - This helps in Adding links like the Admin Menu module for Drupal 7. You can install Toolbar Extra Tools module to benefit from many valuable links in the toolbar menu.
• Admin Toolbar Search - For search modules, you can easily install the submodule, i.e., Admin Toolbar Search.
• Admin Toolbar Links Access Filter: This fixes the display of links for which the user struggles to access.

Download & Install Admin Toolbar

2. Shield:

It would be advisable to install a module that shields your website from anonymous users and search engines during the test phases. It eventually builds a simple shield for the site with Apache authentication. The shield completely protects and takes care of Drupal.

Figure: Shield Module
Download & Install Shield

3. Field group: The field group reorganizes the content types and does not overload content editors. It allows you to group similar fields into tabs - making it easier for people to visualize and deal with the content on the page.

Hence the fieldable structures will have a higher chance to add groups to wrap the fields together. These groups include default HTML wrappers like vertical tabs, horizontal tabs, accordions, fieldsets, div wrappers, etc. The field group module used here is in CCK.

4. Total Control Admin Dashboard:
The whole control admin dashboard is useful for administrative navigation tools.

This Drupal module acts as a focal point for all administration tools. This module also works with Drupal 9. It creates a default panel page using administration tools, offering several administration panes with quick links to content types, menus, taxonomy, and other scattered locations of Drupal site administration.

Source : Figure - Figure - Total Control Admin Dashboard

Here are the following dependencies of Drupal 8:

• Chaos tool suite(ctools)
• Views (in Drupal 8 core)
• Panels

Download & Install the Total control admin dashboard.

5. Chat - Live Helper Chat: This Drupal module permits the integration of open-source chat, i.e., Live Helper. It includes two configuration options:

• Configure LiveHelperChat by the administration, selecting attributes like - domain, height, size, and the title of the chat.
• Set up LiveHelperChat using JS script built by chat server. This script sets in the header of the page.
  
  

In addition, other chat visibility settings get in through the Drupal plugins API:

• Visibility condition per page.
• Visibility condition by user role.
• Visibility condition by content type.

This Drupal module permits administrators to manage JS into the page output according to configurable rules. It is configured with JavaScript, which is compatible with Drupal 9.
Download & Install LiveHelperChat

6. Metatag: The Metatag module enables you to offer extra metadata to your site, basically in the meta description tag and the keywords tag. Both of these are crawled by search engines, and you can optimize your results by including words and phrases that people use to search their keywords. It provides Global settings to control Meta tags on all pages.

• D8 and D9 Token Module
• Download and Install Module

7. Seckit: This module allows you to modify specific HTTP headers on your website to enhance security. It also lets you mitigate the risks of the exploitation of different web application vulnerabilities.

Download & Install Seckit Module

8. Sitemap: Sitemap offers a map that provides visitors an overview of the website. It also displays the RSS feeds of all blogs and listings. Drupal module generates the RSS feeds automatically. It is supportive for both modules Drupal8 & Drupal9.

It displays the following terms:

• Messages get displayed above the site map.
• Books or vocabularies with all the terms, expanded.
• Syndication block with more links that move towards the site map.

Download & Install Sitemap

9. Role Expire: Role Expire is one of the most easy-to-use and specific modules. It is facile for operators to manage expiration dates within their roles. Basically, this module is used for implementing subscriptions, which are in the form of a magazine.

It is also compatible with Drupal 9.

Download & Install Role Expire

10. Leaflet: The leaflet Drupal module is an Advance, easy to use Open-Source JavaScript Library. It is suitable for both Drupal 8 and Drupal 9. The Leaflet module features:

Field formatter that can display the map for fields that include geospatial data.
The well-organized data integrations.
Have a lightweight and easy-to-use API for defining maps and displaying data on a map.
Download & Install Leaflet

11. Copy Prevention: Copy Prevention is a tool to prevent the copying or the theft of content like text and images. Including functionalities that allow you to protect the original content added to the site easily.
It helps to prevent the copying of content.

For Text Content:

• Disable text selection.
• Disable copy to clipboard.
• Disable the right-click context menu.

For Image Content:

• Disable right-click context menu on images.
• Use a transparent gif image above the images.
• Select the minimal image dimension.

Download & Install the Copy Prevention Module

12. Bricks: Bricks — is a modern method of building pages, leading with Entity Reference, Display Modes, Layout API, tabledrag.js, and Flat Tables. Everything in Drupal core makes Bricks underweight and developer-friendly.

Conceptually, this Drupal module is the next generation of Paragraphs, a different approach to Panelize, an excellent friend to ECK, Inline Entity Form, and your favorite WYSIWYG. Moreover, it allows you to nest Entity Reference field items using Drupal drag & drop UI.

Download & Install the Bricks Module

13. Paragraphs: This type of Drupal module allows a flexible way of content creation. It helps in simplifying the life of any site administrator and makes it so much better. Rather than stuffing all of your content in one WYSIWYG body field, this module enables much more freedom.

It empowers you to select on the fly between pre-defined Paragraph Types. Paragraph Types can be text blocks or images to a composite and configure slideshow.

Download & Install the Paragraphs Module

14. Workflows: Workflows is a core module of Drupal 8. It offers an interface to build workflows with transitions between different states provided by various modules.

15. Workspaces: Last but not the least is Workspaces. It is a core module that builds full-site content staging environments within a single site. It forms all of the Content, Blocks, Taxonomy, and Media for your newest campaign, and then utilizes it when ready for launch.

Meeting Business Goals with the Right-Fit CMS

Drupal is an efficient and effective open-source CMS, and a flexible content management platform built to handle a large number of users with different permissions. It empowers collaboration and organizes large volumes of content with ease.

In this article, we've highlighted some of the most frequently used Drupal Modules that work very well for websites.

Are you seeking a partner that will offer you end-to-end Drupal Services or assist you with Drupal module development? Don’t worry, you are on the right page!

Altudo is a certified Drupal web development partner. We specialize in Drupal development, Drupal themes development, plugin development, migration, e-commerce website development on Drupal Commerce, and managed services for Drupal 7, 8 and 9.

Ahh, with all this technical knowledge, we believe having a partner who knuckles down to the big picture of your project is integral to your business success. And so – connect with us to discuss how we can help you solve your Drupal challenges and achieve your business goals.

Get in touch with us via marketing@altudo.co