Top Ten Drupal Modules and Themes of 2011

January 11th, 2012

1. Display Suite
DS lets you customize the output of nodes and their content fields without having to modify template files. Even clients can drag and drop fields and change how they display and are formatted. If only life were this easy!

Ben – Best thing that happened to Drupal since CCK.
Brandon – More ‘Drupal-way’ than panels.
Trent – With the pulling the node and view layout changes out of the template files, we are able to make changes to sites without having to have your desktop or laptop on hand, making Drupal content layout almost completely editable on a mobile device like an iPad or phone.
John – Powerful and versatile, and very intuitive. It’s easy for a developer to incorporate it into their workflow, and before long it’ll look like the solution to almost any problem.
Shea – Powerful and exportable. Something every developer needs.

2. Views 3
Views is a dynamic tool for building queries that display tables and lists of data. The third version has some amazing new abilities and enhanced user interface features.

Ben – The backbone of any Drupal site. More useful then 50% of core modules.
Brandon – They took what makes Drupal good (views 2), and made it better.
Johannes – One of the most essential contributed modules got a major upgrade!
Shea – You simply do not use Drupal without using views. If this isn’t the most useful module out there I don’t know what is.

3. Context 3
Context 3 lets you control conditions and reactions for different sections of a site like displaying a certain block on all nodes of a certain type or hiding a block when a menu or view is active. It saves developers from writing custom hooks and the interface is straight forward so the clients can use it too.

Johannes – Like Views it’s one of the modules we use on all projects for its awesomeness. Happy to see a major release last year.
Shea – Context brings logic and sense to Drupal. It is what is missing in the default blocks system.

4. Omega
Instead of creating a new theme from scratch or maintaining a custom in-house theme for a new project ImageX Media started using this theme as a base for our client themes.

Ben – Great starting theme with responsive abilities backed in. Makes theming fun even for coders.
Brandon – There is also Plink. The strength of Omega is really Delta, see Delta below.
Johannes – My highlights are that it comes out of the box with a responsive grid layout and it’s HTML 5 compliant. The maintainers put a lot of work into this over 2011.
Trent – The way Omega handles regions has been one of the greatest powers I have come to love about the theme. Being able to add a bunch of regions to the .info file, then using the theme settings to place them in what section of the page you need, then being able to change it on a specific page with Delta, the Omega helper module, is awesome. Omega and Display Suite bring the goals of a CMS to the forefront. Manage the content and layout from the administration back end, while staying exportable. Excellence.
John – Great for getting a responsive design up and running quickly.
Shea – Omega + Delta gives amazing flexibility to developers and administrators through the website UI. The work done to not only provide customizable layouts but responsive themes is impressive.

5. Delta
Delta allows you, via the Context module to make duplicates of your theme settings for any context on your site. This gives you the ability for alternative layouts as a reaction in Context.

Ben – In combination with Omega a great set of tools to create theme and layout variations.
Brandon – Delta is no longer Omega-only. Extended to all themes and works extremely well together with Context.
Trent – Took a bit to get used to the concept, now I am not looking back. Layouts, grid settings, region placement and more can be set on a per Context basis.
“Shea” – Delta is to Omega as Views is to Drupal

6. Workbench
One of Drupal’s big learning curves is when you teach a content editor to ‘ignore’ all the technical stuff they get forced to see. It can be overwhelming. So Workbench tries to create a tailored interface just for content editors. Then it adds a permissions structure for editing content that matches the organizations structure. And finally Workbench tries to enable a customizable editorial workflow for moderating and publishing content.

Ben – A lot of potential but still not fully ironed out IMHO.
Johannes – It is not a complete solution, but it’s a great start to make the Drupal content editor experience much better than default.
Shea – A starting base for workflows and moderation. There is still much work needed in this module but it is probably the best choice out there for what it does.

7. CCL
The Custom Contextual Links module allows you to add your own links to the contextual drop down widgets of blocks and nodes. Drupal comes by default with contextual links and until now you would have to do some custom coding to customize this. This module gives you a nice UI to make your changes and doesn’t require PHP coding skills.

Ben – I created the CCL module to make it possible to add your own links to the contextual links widgets in Drupal 7
Shea – A somewhat unknown module that provides a simple but extremely useful bit of functionality.

8. Media
Drupal has had a tough time when it comes to managing files and media ‘assets’. Anything from ‘where do you store a file that’s referenced from the database’, ‘how do you control permissions on those files’, ‘what do you do with the file if the node it was attached to gets deleted’ and (not lastly) ‘how come I can’t reference the same file in multiple nodes’. The Media module is the latest attempt at integrating files and media in an easy to use way that makes sense to everyone. In the latest release, Media allows users to attach fields to files as you would to nodes, link to remote assets like YouTube, drag and drop upload, and even integrates with the WYSIWYG module.

Ben – Equal amount of joy and pain.
Brandon – This is awesome, disregard above. Very easy to use, Media library reduces duplicate file uploads.
Shea – I love to hate it. I want everything it has to offer but immediately want to ditch it when it starts throwing up problems. Still in its infancy stage it has the promise to be an amazing addition to Drupal. The problem is that it doesn’t always work.

9. Field Group
Field Group lets you group fields together. Great solution if you want to make horizontal tabs.

Ben – Works great in combination with DS.
Brandon – Should be in core, too key
Trent – Using Field Groups with Display Suite has become the standard for content layout. Being able to setup tabbed content, or just group content sections on a page without having to build a custom block for the styles has made this a must enable for me.
Shea – Useful for organizing fields. Handy but not a necessity.

10. Backup and Migrate
A simple module that lets you backup the database and files, stores them on the server, lets you download so you can upload to another site or just keep warm under your pillow. This is a quick and easy way to avoid ruining a site when you want to try something new or just to keep a copy of the important stuff. Never leave home without it!

Johannes – Over the last year, we fell more and more in love with this module and it’s one of the first modules I’ll install for any projects. Besides the features described above it has also has a nice module to integrate with Dropbox.
Shea – Backup and Migrate + Amazon S3 simple storage account rules. Fast, effective, and stable backups that are extremely portable make your site recoverable and speed up the local development to development environment syncing.