19 Cool Drupal modules | September 2018

(Available as freelancer)

Joris Snoek

Business Consultant
/ Drupal Developer

'There's a module for that', this applies to many use cases with Drupal. What is not possible with modules we develop tailor-made instead. But because customization is costly, it is good to keep abreast of the available modules. I try to keep track of this every month; although that does not always work, at least here is what struck me about module updates in the last month:

1. Security Kit

Has been quite some time in development and quite popular, but recently received an update. Always good to mention once again, within this Drupal module a number of measures are taken against common safety issues:

• Cross site Scripting
• Cross-site Request Forgery
• Clickjacking

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

2. Twig tweak

Provides a number of handy Twig extensions, which makes the life of a Drupal developer / themer easier. See also this cheat sheet for the concrete possibilities.

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

3. Field Block

For me a blast from the past, we used this module a lot in Drupal 7 installations. It offers a light weight way to position the output of your fields via blocks on a page. Blocks with relevant fields can then be placed lean via the Context module for example.

If you compare this with positioning via for example, Panels, Display Suit or Views it is very lean and mean.

However, a caveat: this approach is meant for developers, if you want to build non-technical content manager pages this is a less suitable method.

It is also possible to position fields with the Layout Builder, nowadays in the Drupal core. See this video.

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

4. Track da files

The Drupal 8 core has a good file management system, for both public and private files. But there are no statistics / reports in, this module provides for this to include the following features:

• One list with all files
• Number of downloads per file
• IP address statistics
• Export data to CSV

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

5. Heading

When you work with Paragraphs, you will understand the usefulness of this Drupal module: you simply need a simple header field which you can position between paragraphs or other sections in your page: plain text and choose h1-h6.

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

6. File hash

An addition to the standard Drupal file system, with which all uploaded files are uniquely characterized by a hash. With this you can, for example, detect duplicate files and verify copies against original files.

A unique hash per file is stored in MD5, SHA-1 and/or SHA-256 format.

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

7. Smart IP

This Drupal module collects all kinds of visitor information based on the IP of the user, such as:

• Place of residence
• Country
• Time zone
• Postal code (approximate)
• Degrees of latitude and longitude (approximate)

Please note the necessary reports regarding AVG / GDPR.

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

8. Freelinking

A 'looser' way for content managers to create links. By default you have to enter a 'hard' link to a page, but after installing this Drupal module you can also use the page title, in which case you enter: [[nodetitle:Title of the Page]].

This module automatically creates a working link.

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

9. Facets

Building a relatively easy "faceted search" in Drupal 8: filtering as you may know from Marktplaats.nl. This module works with the Drupal core search or the commonly used Search API module.

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

10. Show email

A micro module that can show the e-mail address on a user profile page.

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

11. Iframe

Generates an extra field, which you can use to load an external website via an iframe. You can set height and width, optionally set a title and attributes for frameborder and scroll styling.

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

12. Views Bulk Edit

Change bulk values of fields in nodes or other entities. This module uses the popular Views Bulk Operations module.

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

13. Menu Item Extras

Do you want to add extra fields to menu items? Install this module. You can see it as 'Fieldable menus', allowing you to store and display all kinds of additional information in a menu item.

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

14. Redirect after login

A mini module, with which you can set which page someone ends up on after logging in.

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

15. Lockr

When you work with encrypted data (eg user data), Drupal always needs a key to decrypt it, otherwise you can not use that data in the Drupal platform. If this key is on the same server, a hacker would potentially still have all the data at hand. If this key is on a different server, it will be a lot more difficult. This module provides for the latter.

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

16. Automatic IP ban (Autoban)

Drupal security module which analyzes visitor behavior: when suspicious actions are detected, the relevant IP address is added to a black list.

There are various settings possible, so you can adjust how strict the module operates.

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

17. Bootstrap menu items

A fan of the Bootstrap HTML framework in your Drupal site? Then this module may be useful: make easy drop-down menu items and separators between menu items.

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

18. Chosen

Makes the selection of items (eg Drupal taxonomy terms) a lot easier for content managers in your Drupal system.

/Drupal-chosen.png

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

19. Paragraphs jQuery UI Accordion

Do you use Paragraphs and want to show an accordion? You guessed it: this module can help a long way in the right direction.

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

Wrap up

Ok, that's it for this month. Expect a new version next month!