Modules of the Month: January 2013 (Better late than never)

How many times have you had to try to sort out access issues on a Drupal site? Sometimes this can be a pain, but the module, by Eduardo Garcia of Anexus IT, promises to help put an end to this senseless suffering; it helps track down the exact point at which a particular role is denied access for a particular node or path. Perhaps the screenshot here is a bit contrived; the only reason the basic "authenticated user" cannot create a new node of type "Article" is that they don’t have the appropriate permission checked. In a more complex site with lots of custom content and custom user-access code, this could be very useful. (My primary work is on a team where the access model for all content types and users would require a full article to explain.)

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, by Dan Polant of Commerce Guys, allows developers to extend the popular Advanced Help module. By implementing the provided hook, you can add a link to the "Help" region of specific paths; the link opens a modal box with the relevant "advanced help" content. Nice.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

The module, from Michael Strelan of Glo Digital, redirects anonymous users to another domain, but visitors can still reach /user or /user/login to authenticate. After logging in, users have normal access. This can easily be configured to limit access to a staging server and redirect users to your production site, the most typical use case for the module.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

The module, authored by Zyxware Technologies, allows setting different expiry times for content cached with Boost. Complex rules can be configured to fine-tune how long various content on your site is cached. Older nodes can have a longer cache lifetime, for instance. Rules can be configured for the URL path, node type, age, etc. This definitely looks like a must-have for sites which use Boost, especially if they actively add new content on a regular basis and retain older content.

Status: There are stable releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.

The module, coded by Pol Dell'Aiera of Trasys, is dead simple. Just activate it and you get three new contextual links on blocks so you don’t need to go into the block administration page just to disable a block or move it up or down within a region. I think this is great, since probably most of the time I go into the block administration page, which can take a while to load on a complex site with a lot of blocks and regions, moving one block up or down (or disabling a block) is all I really want to do, so allowing administrators to manage this from within the front-end is a really sweet feature.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The CKEditor Link File module, created by Devin Carlson, integrates (and requires) the CKEditor Link and File entity modules so that editors on your site can easily add links to existing files on your site. This definitely looks useful for sites which use CKEditor.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, written by Girish Nair, allows you to address up to three different vocabularies with one term-reference field; obviously only one vocabulary in the group can take “free tagging”. If new terms are added, they go into the first of the vocabularies selected for the Combined Termref field. There can be good reasons that you need different vocabularies, but the purpose can stay behind the scenes; content creation can be simpler by allowing entry with a single field. I think this looks cool.

Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.

The module, authored by Aidan Lister, provides an option to add rules for displaying messages on your Drupal Commerce cart. This definitely looks useful.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, written by Rik de Boer of flink, provides a Views plugin that allows you to filter views based on a range of values for any field where this might make sense. For instance, you might want to filter by price range, age range, etc. This kind of search is a pretty common use case, so I suspect this will become quite popular.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, by Ben Scott, defines a field type for attaching Creative Commons licence types, so you can add CC licences to files or any entity type. There are other modules which can add a CC license, but they only work with nodes; files are likely a most common use case. Cool!

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Categories: Utility

The module, coded by Dave Hall, provides extra utility functions to extend the Entity API module. The idea is to share useful functions here and improve on them before proposing them for inclusion in Entity API or Drupal core. If you aren’t a developer, you’ll probably only enable this if another module requires it, but if you write your own modules which use the Entity API, this is probably worth taking a look at.

Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.

The module, written by Kaushal Kishore of OSSCube, allows you to import your Facebook albums and photo galleries. You can also import the images from your friends’ accounts, too, but be sure you ask your friends if it’s okay. Personally, I only allow friends to view my Facebook account, so people like me might be annoyed if the images they shared on Facebook were pulled into a public-facing album without their consent. That said, companies with a Facebook presence might like to pull the images from their Facebook galleries into a gallery on their main website, and I’m sure there are many other good use cases for this module.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, created by Robert Castelo of Code Positive, provides a way to deploy content from the Field Collection fields from one site to another. It extends (and requires) Features, Field Collection (of course), UUID, Node Export, and Entity API. Getting this to work is clearly non-trivial, but if you need this functionality, you’ll be happy to find this module.

Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.

Categories: Media

The module, contributed by Graham Bates of Catch Digital, provides a widget for file fields with previews of uploaded files, as configured with File Entity. It otherwise works like the “core” File widget.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, written by Clemens Tolboom, renders a Graphviz text file for further processing; it hooks into Graph API to provide Views integration and can output an image file using the Graphviz Filter.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

is another graph-related module contributed by Clemens Tolboom. It renders an interactive graph using Graph API. Pretty cool, if your site calls for this, and I can think of at least one project where this might have saved some custom coding.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

The module, by B-Prod of MaPS System, redirects users to a configurable error page whenever a fatal error is thrown in PHP. Of course the error is also logged into the watchdog so you can work on eliminating the error for the next user. Nice.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, by Marcus Deglos of Techito, is a developer module (you won’t need this, as a non-coder unless another module requires it) which provides a simple hierarchical_taxonomy_get_tree() function which renders an array of a vocabulary’s hierarchical structure. This should probably be in “core”.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

The module, contributed by Tuan, integrates two image zoom-related JQuery plugins; Power Zoomer and Featured Zoomer and the developer of this module is adding support for other modules which provide image zooming. This could be cool for online “catalog” images or for commercial photography sites who want to provide a closer look at an image without making it too simple for users to download a higher-resolution version.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, contributed by Nguyễn Hải Nam of Open Web Solutions, helps find the focal center of an image you are scaling and cropping and includes advanced facial recognition algorithms. This looks interesting.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, developed by Manuel García, provides an additional formatter for the core image field so that you can create, for instance, a “thumbnail” which links to a larger, watermarked version of the image. This seems like a common enough need that this kind of functionality should probably be added to core. Until then, there’s this.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, developed by Sina Salek integrates the jQuery UI Slider plugin so you can easily allow users of your site to utilize a graphical slider to quickly enter an integer value in a field. This looks handy, especially for users accessing your site without a normal keyboard.

Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.

The module, written by Ryan Jacobs integrates the beautiful Juicebox HTML5 responsive gallery library into your Drupal site. There’s a lot to this module; probably enough to have a whole article dedicated to ways you can use it, but it definitely looks nice if you want to provide image galleries that render well on a wide range of devices. Like many other such modules that integrate third-party code, it requires Libraries and adding the Juicebox code to your sites/all/libraries directory. We should note that there are both Lite (free) and Pro (commercial) versions of Juicebox (you’ll need to decide which is more appropriate for your use case) and the maintainers of this module are not affiliated with the developers of Juicebox, itself. This module will work to integrate either version of Juicebox.

Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.

The module, written by James I. Armes of AllPlayers.com, allows field values for Drupal entities to be lazy-loaded rather than loaded at the time the entity loads, so can provide a boost to performance and memory usage. This module is for developers, so will not be useful to you unless you are a coder who needs to lazy-load fields. Otherwise you would only enable this module if another module requires it.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

The module, by Chris Skene of PreviousNext, is a developer module to help retrieve, cache, and work with linked data sources. It depends on EasyRDF and X Autoload and Guzzle is also recommended.

Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.

The module, written by Dave Reid of Palantir.net, adds a Library reference field type so that libraries can be attached to individual entities when rendered, thus saving your site from loading lots of unnecessary Javascript for every page. It also adds an option to the Views UI so allows adding libraries for specific Views displays. This is a great idea!

Status: There is an RC release available for Drupal 7.

The module, written by Fredric Bergström of Wunderkraut, provides “dummy images” which it fetches from the very slick lorempixel.com web service. Oh, and the module can also be used to get the placeholder images added to content by Devel generate.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

The module, written by Neo Khuat, creates a block with a “cloud” of terms from a taxonomy. You’ll need to download and add some Javascript files to the module’s “js” folder. So you don’t need to save and replace the Javascript files, it might be better to symlink them to a directory in sites/all/libraries.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, written by Alex Posidelov, helps simplify the process of converting a single site Drupal installation to multisite. A lot of the work is done for you with just one click of a button and it helps lead the administrator through the rest of the requirements. It depends on the Backup and Migrate module.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

, by teknic of Appnovation Technologies, provides a means to send notification emails to a site administrator when a configurable volume or frequency of 404 (page not found) errors have occurred.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, developed by Andrew Berezovsky of Axel Springer Russia, adds an Image field formatter for viewing images in a Photobox image gallery. You’ll need to use the jQuery Update module since Photobox requires jQuery 1.8. This does look nice.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

The module, coded by hhhc, integrates the free recommender services hosted by RecommenderGhost. It makes it easy to display recommendations for “other visitors bought…”, etc. This is much simpler than installing and integrating a separate server.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Categories: Fields

The module, created by Kevin Miller of Cal State Monterey Bay, is a helper module for displaying recent or most relevant entities under an entity reference field and was a winner of the Module Off challenge. It definitely sounds useful.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

The module, produced by Tobias Haugen of Wunderkraut, adds a hidden checkbox to your site’s registration form; if checked, the registration process is aborted. “Robot” users tend to check the box, so it can be a simple way to eliminate at least some of the unwanted registrations used for spamming your site or other nefarious purposes. There are other modules which help with protecting forms like this, but a wide variety of spam prevention methods are useful for keeping a step ahead of the bot coders.

Status: There are stable releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.

The module, written by Stefan Borchert of undpaul, defines a new form widget for hierarchical taxonomy fields so you can simply navigate the structure of the taxonomy and select a term.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, by Ilya I, can add “Terms of Use”, “Privacy policy” or other agreements to the registration form. Visitors who want to register on your site need to agree to the terms of the “disclaimer” in order to register.

Status: There is a stable stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, coded by Shoaib Rehman Mirza of Xululabs, integrates the tablesorter jQuery plugin so that any standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags can be turned into a sortable table without even requiring a page refresh. Of course it’s not helpful if the data is paginated, but for normal tables with all the data on one page, this could be useful. Of course you need to download the Javascript libraries and install them in your sites/all/libraries directory, and of course that means this depends on Libraries API.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, contributed by Jay Beaton allows administrators to select certain taxonomy vocabularies and prevent them from being deleted. That way, even if some users who need to be able to administer taxonomies don’t fully understand the system, they won’t make the mistake of deleting a critical vocabulary.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

The module, created by Mark Koester of Int3c.com: International Cross-Cultural Consulting, allows you to add a message in the top of your Drupal pages. The message can be dismissed with a click on a “close” link and can include links and other formatting. There are other such modules, but this one might be the best fit for your use case. It does look useful.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

The module, authored by Thomas Lattimore of Classic Graphics, is a Views plugin which allows you to add a fade in/out effect for Ajax-enabled Views displays. This would be nice for some use cases.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Categories: Content

The module, by Andrew Lindsay provides a textarea component for Drupal webforms which includes a configurable, Twitter-style dynamic word or character count to limit the length of submissions. Of course it requires the Webformmodule and Libraries module (as well as the word-and-character-counter.js in sites/all/libraries.

Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.

Categories: Content

The module, is another Webform-enhancing module contributed by Andrew Lindsay. It adds strong, configurable postal code validation which can even be set to handle multiple countries simultaneously. In addition to the obvious dependency on Webform, this also requires the Postal Code Validation module.

Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.