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Useful modules for Drupal 7

Everybody has their list of modules they use very often or that are included in (almost) every project. Despite the fact that Drupal has stepped into its new era with the coming of Drupal 8, I'd like to set up my very own list for Drupal 7 in light of legacy purposes. 

Call it a form of documentation, if you will.

Before I kick things off, I'd like to mention that I hand-picked some specific modules Drupal.org has to offer. This means that the obvious modules such as Views (now in the Drupal 8 core), Webform, i18n, etc. aren't listed. Every other developer has them in their list, so it would be overkill to add them to my list as well... 

1. Libraries

Libraries is a module that allows you to use the benefit of mulitple plugins that aren't shipped with your Drupal installation or the installed modules. This permits you to use... Let's say the headroomjs-module. Just add the module to your sites/all/modules-directory and add the jQuery-plugin to your sites/all/libraries-folder. The module picks up the library and uses it where it's requested.

2. Easy Breadcrumb

Ever had it that your breadcrumbs seem off when a page is nested deep?
This module can fix this just by installing and enabling the module. Like the name says: easy. Pretty awesome, right?

Easy Breadcrumb uses the current URL (path alias) and the current page's title to automatically extract the breadcrumb's segments and its respective links. It auto-generates the breadcrumb by using the current URL.

3. Menu Trail by Path

Menu Trail by Path is a great module by the hand of edndahead. It skips the need for additional menu-items to get the correct item to be highlighted, which holds great benefit for usability, UX and I do believe Google likes this too (mainly the pattern-settings).

Just fix the pattern in Pathauto to save the structure for your content-type and the menu-item of the parent-node will be highlighted.

This is very useful for blogs, portfolios, events, etc.
Pretty much everything with an overview-page and underlying pages for the content-type.

4. Social Share

Typical social share buttons like the Tweet-button or the FB Share-button don't allow much tweaking for these buttons. This is where Social Share comes in to give you extra benefits.

It gives you a set of links to share content across social media, with more flexibilty for styling since they're just simple links.

The module was discontinued for a while, but now that I'm a co-maintainer, I'd like to revive the project by adding a couple of features and social networks, but that's for the (near) future...

5. Boost

If there's a module for making your site quicker by caching, it's Boost allright.

This module saves a simple HTML-file of every page on your site once it's rendered. If you enable Boost Crawler, it even does it on its own. 

6. Admin menu

Administration Menu is a well known module, highly downloaded. It defeats the purpose of the configuration-page by giving the administrator a dropdown menu for quick overview of all available settings.

7. Masquerade

If you've ever had to handle permissions shipped with the Drupal-system, you might have noticed it's hard to test this. Logging out, logging back in, and repeat if it's not ok...

Masquerade gives you an easy link that allows you to log out of your admin-account and log back in with a given username to test the settings. Very handy for quick testing. 

8. Module filter

When a site grows it functionality, your module-page might seem a little slow and definetly long. When you have to look for a single module, you have to look for it using CMD/CTRL + F and skip through all the mentions between the dependencies of other modules.

Module Filter simply gives you an overview of all modules included in your site. It also gives you a simple search field, giving you only the module you're looking for, without unwanted dependencies. The overview also contains tabs on the left, so you can find every module within a group. Very handy for maintaining your modules.  

9. Admin Views

Administration Views gives the admin or webmaster (depending on how you defined your roles) a nice overview on the content page, based on a view. This means you can add or remove fields in the table. The seach above the table can also be adjusted to your needs due to the flexibility of Views Exposed Filters. 

10. IP Geolocation Views & Maps

Imagine you've got a content type for a bunch of stores. Every store had an address, so you have a geolocation too.

If you want to, Rik De Boer wrote a nifty module enabling a Google Maps for the View of the stores.
With the use of IP Geolocation Views & Maps, you can make sure the user has a quick overview of the nearest locations, based on his or her current location.

I'll be sure to write a blogpost soon explaining how this can be realised. So stay tuned.