In June 2012, there were over 160 new Drupal modules released. This article provides some coverage for the most noteworthy of those modules, at least from our point of view. As in the past editions of this article, we generally ignore modules which are only for limited use cases or which simply provide integration of commercial third-party services. We also have not tried out many of these modules and have not thoroughly tested any of them. We normally don’t list modules that seem to be far from “ready” (e.g. no actual release yet), but we can make no claims as to the stability of the modules covered. Be sure to back up your database before testing new modules that might cause pain and suffering.
I think that many might agree that some of the most significant new modules from June were Author , Edit , and Layout —released by Angie Byron and Wim Leers as part of the Acquia -sponsored Spark distribution , which aims to improve the content-authoring user experience for Drupal 8 (the current distribution and modules allows us to use these improvements in Drupal 7 and help improve them). This work is still not ready for use on production sites (“dev” releases at most), but the progress is exciting, nonetheless. And despite the fact that Acquia is sponsoring development, we can all contribute to this awesome project by experimenting and reporting our experience (bug reports or ideas about ways to further improve the user experience) and/or submitting patches. We are definitely excited about Spark!
Thanks to Sascha Grossenbacher and Miro Dietiker of MD Systems there are a number of new support plugins for the Translation Management Tools (TMGMT) which they have recently released, now providing support for translation services available from Google , Microsoft , MyGengo , Nativy , and Supertext . Each of these new modules that extend the main Translation management module are currently available as dev releases for Drupal 7.
Matt Cheney of Pantheon Systems has also recently released a number of exciting “apps” (modules which depend on the Apps module ) to flesh out the feature-set of their popular Panopoly distribution ; these include: Panopoly Admin
, Panopoly Core
, Panopoly Demo
, Panopoly Images
, Panopoly Magic
, Panopoly Pages
, Panopoly Search
, Panopoly Theme
, Panopoly Users
, Panopoly Widgets
, and Panopoly WYSIWYG . All of these new modules are still considered to be in “beta” for Drupal 7, and while some of these may work without the Panopoly distribution, I won’t cover their functionality in detail. They do appear to provide some useful enhancements to Drupal’s standard installation and what their distribution could formerly offer, so this is some significant progress and worth taking a look at if you want to provide a friendly user experience or want to keep up with the latest and greatest in development for distributions.
The rest of the most noteworthy modules are listed in alphabetical order with brief descriptions of their functionality, development status, and module categories on Drupal.org (in some cases, we selected appropriate categories if none were provided on the project page. A couple are not actual modules, but are included as Drupal “projects” also worthy of mention.)
Bean Panels
The module, authored by Lee Rowlands of PreviousNext , allows Beans to be used within Panels . Very cool!
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Booking.com API
The module, written by Rafal W. , is an API for Drupal developers to allow us to build Booking.com (hotel booking) features into our sites.
Status: There is a dev release available for Drupal 7.
Clean Comments
The module, written by Manuel Garcia , adds a bit of JavaScript to each page which hides the comment links (edit/delete/reply) so that they only appear when hovering over a comment.
Status: There is a dev release available for Drupal 7.
Community Media Header
The module, written by Kevin Reynen of makedatamakesense.com , allows you to provide header images which can vary based on site section or context.
Status: There is a dev release available for Drupal 7.
Conditional Rules
The module, from Jason Zhang of the Australian National University , allows you to provide branched conditions for Rules using “if / else” and “switch / case” so that you don’t need to create multiple similar rules just to manage basic differences in conditions. This functionality is a long time coming, in my opinion, so I’ll definitely be giving this one a whirl.
Status: There is a dev release available for Drupal 7.
Contentment
The module, written by Peter Anderson of Alma Technology , gets its name as a contraction of “content management”, which might seem odd since one might say that Drupal, itself, is for for content management. So what does it do? It provides a nicer overview of site content with tabs for each content type
Status: There is a release candidate available for Drupal 7.
Cryptolog
The module, from Mark Burdett of the Electronic Frontier Foundation , enhances user privacy by replacing IP addresses in site logs with randomized identifiers. Each identifier is unique to an IP address for each day, so you can still analyze site statistics (such as visitors per day). This would be useful for certain kinds of sites where user privacy might be more important, but it might also make it harder to track longer term patterns of spam posting or repeat visitors.
Status: There is a dev release available for Drupal 7.
Dropdown Checkboxes
The module, by arijit dutta of Faichi Solutions , integrates the DDCL library, to replace normal HTML select lists with a drop-down checkbox list for better usability. It would be nice to see this kind of functionality natively provided by browsers.
Status: There is a release candidate available for Drupal 7.
DrupalPro
The project, contributed Mike Stewart of Media Done Right , is not a module at all, but definitely an interesting project for people who want to get up and running with a new Drupal development environment. It’s an Ubuntu-based VirtualBox disk image which can be run right off of a USB3 stick. It has loads of great utilities already installed, as well, of course, as a full DAMP stack. Assuming your production server is Linux-based, this Virtual box should provide a much more compatible testing environment than a MAMP/WAMP development environment. The disk image includes Drush
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
Drush live
Categories: Drush
The module, produced by James Silver of ComputerMinds , provides some nice enhancements for Drush. Explaining it here is outside the scope of this article, but it does look like it could be useful.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Entity Property Field
The module, by Erik Summerfield of Phase2 Technology , provides a simple display field with format widgets to display entity properties as if they were normal fields (e.g. to provide a field with formatters to show the date/time updated information for a node
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
Felix
The module, by Maurits Lawende of Dutch Open Projects , provides a simplified way for site editors to add a preset selection of blocks to pre-defined page regions without any need to use block administration. Cool stuff!
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
GMap3 Tools
The module, contributed by Ivica Puljic of MontenaSoft , is a developer API for integrating Google Maps (version 3) into a Drupal site.
Status: There is a dev release available for Drupal 7.
Handy Block
The module, developed by Jeremy Epstein , helps eliminate the need for custom modules just to provide a block which relates to the current entity. It’s considered a “convenience module” for developers and themers.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Image Annotator
Categories: Fields
The module, written by Peter Droogmans , helps add annotation markers to images.
Status: There is a dev release available for Drupal 7.
Image Autosize filter
The module, written by Hai-Nam Nguyen of Open Web Solutions , keeps content consistent and streamlines the editorial workflow
Status: There are stable releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.
Image Preset
The module, by Yuriy Babenko of Suite101 , allows you to simply select an ImageCache preset for Views
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
jQuery File Upload and jQuery Kaltura Uploader
The and modules, both coded by John Youssef of JesoX , are similar modules which provide enhanced file upload functionality and a “multi-uploader”. Both modules depend on the jQuery Update module and look similar. Differences include that the jQuery File Upload module supports non-image/video documents (e.g. .doc and .pdf files, etc), whereas the Kaltura uploader supports only images and video file-types, requires the Kaltura module, and uploads files to your configured Kaltura account.
Status: There are dev releases available (for both modules) for Drupal 7.
jQuery LocalScroll
The module, written by Gabor Szanto , uses the jQuery LocalScroll library (installed separately using the Libraries API module ) and allows you to build sites with links to anchor points on a page which smoothly scroll to those anchor point links, when clicked. This can look pretty cool and is ideal for mini-sites or to minimize page requests. See the project page for links to example sites.
Status: There is a dev release available for Drupal 7.
JSON 2
The module, is also produced by Peter Droogmans and provides integration of the JSON 2 JavaScript library. This could definitely be useful.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Link API
Categories: Content
The module, by Chris Skene of PreviousNext , provides some nice tools for developers to manage links on a Drupal site. This can include validation of links, maintaining a list of all links, etc. This definitely looks handy!
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 6 (and we are hoping this will get ported to D7. ).
Link Badges and Menu Badges
The and modules, both developed by Wayne Eaker of Zengenuity , work together (Link badges is a developer API which is used by Menu badges and can be used by developers for other modules) to provide iOS-style “badges” next to links, e.g. to indicate the number of unread messages, items in a cart, etc. Very nice!
Status: There are stable releases available for Drupal 7.
Microsites
The module, also contributed by Chris Skene of PreviousNext , helps simplify using Drupal to produce “Microsites” within a Drupal installation, so they can have their own menus, etc. This looks very cool!
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 6.
Ming
is yet another module by Chris Skene of PreviousNext . Ming allows site developers to work with data stored in MongoDB databases and provides a number of nice features, including maintaining multiple persistent connections to MongoDB databases, shortcuts for MongoDB tasks and for accessing stored objects without need for creating full MongoID classes, etc. This looks very interesting.
Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.
Postal Code Validation
The module, produced by Liam Morland of University of Waterloo, is a developer API which helps provide postal code validation for a number of different countries. It has no user interface of its own, but allows developers to utilize its functions in their own modules.
Status: There is a release candidate available for Drupal 7.
Promo node
The module, created by Mikke Schirén of NodeOne , provides a system for promoting various Drupal nodes on your site, thus eliminating the need for creating a special “promo” content type.
Status: There is a dev release available for Drupal 7.
Publish button
The module, also created by Mikke Schirén , provides a simple “publish” button next to the “Save” button so you don’t need to force your site’s content creators to check the “publish” box, then click on “Save”. This provides a more natural workflow and helps prevent accidentally creating nodes without publishing them (or vice-versa, depending on how you might create your content type defaults.) Very simple… but very nifty!
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
Reverse Proxy Check
The module, written by Justin Emond , helps verify that nothing has broken your reverse proxy caching for anonymous admin/reports/status)
Status: There are stable releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.
Rules URL Argument
The module, written by Tadej Baša , allows you to check for and get the value of arguments used in the URL and use them in Rules .
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
SAML Service Provider
The module, by Marcus Deglos of Acquia , is pretty cool… it allows users to verify their identity with a SAML IDP (Identitity Provider) server to streamline registration and login.
Status: There is a dev release available for Drupal 7.
Scheduler Workbench Integration
The module, produced by William Hurley of Forum One Communications , allows you to set dates for Workbench-moderated content to be published and/or unpublished. This is definitely useful for managing the scheduled release of editor-moderated content.
Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.
Search synonyms
Categories: Search
The module, produced by Aidan Lister , allows you to add synonyms for search terms to the index so that, for example, people searching for “Holland” will see full search results which also include the (usually-synonymous term), “The Netherlands”.
Status: There are stable releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.
Taxonomy add previous
The module, created by Joachim Noreiko , helps streamline the process of adding related or similar taxonomy terms by automatically populating the new term fields with the values used for the previous taxonomy term and provides a second link for this functionality next to the normal “add term” link. This could definitely be useful for certain use cases.
Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.
Views Dataviz
The module, developed by Jurriaan Roelofs , is a modern, HTML5-based data visualization system for providing charts from Views data, etc. Nicely done!
Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.
Views Rules
The module, is another contribution (like the Conditional Rules, above) by Jason Zhang of the Australian National University , which provides integration between Rules and Views . Getting into the particulars of using this module would be a separate article on its own, but it definitely looks cool!
Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.
Views Slideshow Liquid Carousel
The module, written by Jonathan DeLaigle of Advomatic , integrates the Liquid Carousel Javascript library into Views Slideshow , allowing you to provide fluid layout to a Views Slideshow, e.g. fluidly alter the number of thumbnail links visible as the window’s width changes. This looks slick!
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
