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Modules from the Month of May - Most promising new modules

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Modules of the month story banner illustration.

In May 2012, 150 new Drupal modules were released; this post provides an overview of some of the most promising modules including developer APIs, theming tools, configuration assistants, useful enhancements to other modules and much more.

Going through the list of new modules, I found it difficult, this time, to select the “most useful”. Of course what seems “useful” depends largely on ones use case, so what you find indispensable, I might I find useless today, and tomorrow I might decide it’s a vital part of my new project. With one exception, the selected modules should all be reasonably “ready for use” (i.e. they at least have a release of some kind) and are mostly modules I could imagine using, myself, even if I don’t have an immediate need for many of them. Some modules which were not included in this selection include several "third-party integration” modules, especially those for “commercial” services. And in contrast to the post made for the April’s “modules-of-the-month”, I have not attempted to sort the selection of modules by category, but instead have the list sorted alphabetically, by project name—the summaries include the categories used on the modules’ Drupal.org project descriptions (and reasonable categories have been added for a few modules which currently haven’t got any categories selected on drupal.org).

As with last time, I have not been able to personally test all of the modules, so don’t blame me if you enable one that looks promising… and it hoses your database.

Addressfield Tokens

The module, by Andrew Marcus of New Signature, has already got over a hundred sites using it, so clearly this was an innovation that people had been waiting for. It’s a nifty extension to the Address Field module (so obviously depends on that) which also requires the Entity Token sub-module (part of the Entity API module). A token such as [addressfield:full] can be used to insert (in this example) a full, formatted address. It integrates well with MailChimp and Webform.

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

Apache log4php integration

The module, by Erik Webb of Acquia, like most modules from Acquia, is complex enough that it’s not easy to summarize; that said, this module provides integration with the Apache log4php™ library to simplify the process of logging errors. It’s a “better watchdog” that uses a common-purpose library to log messages to a wide variety of backend logging systems with improved control compared to Drupal’s standard message logging (Watchdog) system. You obviously need to install the log4php library (using PEAR or the Libraries module)

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

Article Templater

Categories: Content

The module, by John Youssef (JesoX), sounds like a great idea (caveat: I’ve yet to actually experiment with this). It provides savable structure for any content type body, including snippets, etc, so if you have a particular article format it can be easily inserted into your body field. It supports CKEditor and Wysiwyg.

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

Block Conditional Visibility by URI Query Parameters

The module, written by Solomon Gifford, extends the normal controls for where a block is displayed to allow blocks to be shown (or hidden) if a particular query string is appended to the URL, e.g. https://example.com?referrer=google. Tres cool!

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

Colorbox Node

The module, produced by Dennis Blake, allows you to display any page (minus header and footer) within a Colorbox modal. Despite the word “node” in the module name, it supports user pages, Views pages, Webforms, and more.

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

Commerce Fancy Attributes The example color selector for Commerce Fancy Attributes

The module, developed by Julien Dubois and Bojan Živanović of Commerce Guys, provides a Javascript-enabled way to change the boring, ugly radio button set into a prettier selector. The example use case is a color selector used on a product’s “add to cart” form with nice color swatches to click rather than labeled radio buttons. But if Javascript is disabled, it gracefully degrades to normal radio buttons. Nice!

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

Compass: Commerce Dashboard & Analytics
Compass is my effort to turn Drupal Commerce data into comprehensible information.

The module, authored by Jurriaan Roelofs, provides nice visualizations in the form of graphs and charts of your Drupal commerce data using interactive HTML5/VML Google Charts with views integration. It has a long list of dependencies, but most of these will already be in use on a complex Drupal Commerce-enabled site.

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

Cookie Log

The module, produced by PK Vaish of Livelink New Media, provides a simple record of all cookies set by your site so that you can better audit cookies for compliance with the new EU “cookie law”.

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

Corresponding Entity References
As this is the next evolution of Corresponding Node References, I would like to say thanks for all the work done over on Corresponding Node References. This is almost a direct upgrade from CNR to include handling of entities.

The module, by Chris Hertzog of CODEwork Designs, allows two entity types to have references to each other which are automatically automatically updated if changed in one of the entity instances.

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

Create-editor
The development has just started and the module is not yet usable, we are just testing the concept and a complete rewrite will probably occur once we know how to deal with everything. All help is welcome.

The module, written by Finish developers Roni Kantis of Soprano Brain Alliance and Riku Virta, the front-end developer of the actual Create library, is the only project listed here which does not yet have any kind of usable release. Despite not yet being usable and being in the early stages of development, the goals of this project are so impressive and worthy of continued interest, that I felt it deserved mention. Create, from the Midgard Project allows you to integrate the browsing and content editing user experience to allow editing without going into a “content administration” form. So you can easily change content directly on a page and submit changes back to the server. I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on this.

Status: There is no real release available yet (but you can download the current state of the project as a development snapshot or check out the project with Git).

Data Visualization Wizard

The module, written by Jason Hoekstra of the U.S. Department of Education, has a goal to simplify and streamline the process of creating complex data visualizations in Drupal.

[…]Views, OpenLayers, Charts and Graphs and others provided a quick way to show data online without custom programming, but became a maintenance burden in the long run, often taking 8-32 hours to create a new visualization. For this reason, we distilled the best practices from these patterns into a single module. The end goal is to lower the technical complexity required to create new visualizations and decrease the time required to do so.

Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 6.

Entity Reference Count

The module, written by Pablo Cerda of BlueSpark Labs, is an entity-based adaptation of the Nodereference Count module, which allows you to add an automatically-calculated field to any entity which will display a value for the number of other entities which reference it.

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

Exclusive Value

The module, by Robert Castelo of Code Positive, is a module which provides a basic checkbox field (boolean setting) which can be enabled for any one node to make it the featured node. When the checkbox is set on one node, it is unset for all others (only one node is featured with this setting). While this might not be useful on every Drupal site, I can certainly think of situations where I would definitely make use of this simple module.

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

Fallback language negotiation
Change the Default language without changing the default language by using a other language as fallback.

The module, coded by German Drupal developers, Florian Weber of [di] digitale informationssysteme gmbh and Dennis Brücke, has a funny description (see quote to right). I’ve not had a need for it yet, but I’m sure it’s useful for some situations.

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

Google Viewer file formatter

The module, by Janez Urevc of Delo, integrates the Google doc viewer to display a number of different document types (.pdf, .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, etc). It requires enabling the File entity module.

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

LimeSurvey Sync

The module, contributed by Julien Duteil , provides integration of LimeSurvey results into a Drupal site.

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

Log Em Out

The module, from Minnur Yunusov of Urban Insight, prevents multiple concurrent sessions from different IPs on the same user account by automatically logging out any previous connection if a user logs in from a different IP. For membership sites this could help prevent sharing of accounts and it should also help ensure security. In permissions, you can select which roles this behavior is applied to.

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

Lorempixel

The module, contributed by Fredric Bergström of NodeOne, brings improved “placeholder image” creation to Drupal by accessing free images on lorempixel.com, which can be “generated” at any image size needed. It integrates with Devel generate, but can also be used to add an image as a file entity.

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

Node Field

Categories: Fields

The module, contributed by Alexander of ADCI, LLC, allows you to add unique extra fields to individual Drupal nodes without needing to add the fields to the content type. This provides a lot of flexibility and helps prevent excessive “field clutter” or the need for more content types.

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

Node View Permissions

The module, was (like Node Field) also developed by Alexander of ADCI, LLC, provides Drupal 7 with the permissions: "View own content" and "View any content" for each content type, just as it was in Drupal 6. This could be especially useful for D6 sites which made special use of these permissions and now need to be upgraded to Drupal 7.

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

OG Extras

The module, contributed by one of the Drupal community’s superstars, Karen Stevenson, is a set of “extras” for Organic Groups. It’s especially useful for sites which don’t use Panels since it provides Views and Blocks for Organic Groups which don’t depend on Panels.

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

Panels Frame

The module, written by Helior Colorado of Commerce Guys, gives Panels users a simpler way to build new complex layouts by stacking existing Panels layouts. Cool!

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

Pathauto i18n Taxonomy

The module, by Marco Kleine-Albers, provides i18n tokens for taxonomy paths in Pathauto so users get paths in their own language. Of course this is also good for SEO.

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

Popcorn.js

The module, written by Kevin Reynen of makedatamakesense, integrates the cool media viewer, Popcorn.js, which includes support for YouTube and Vimeo as well as other interesting HTML5 applications.

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

Portable path

is a module, from the great Jim Berry, which helps make it easier to move a site from a development/staging domain to “production”.

After a review of existing input filters and related modules, none seemed to do this. Some remove the domain portion of the path, making the path portable in certain contexts but not across all use cases. But none finished the job by replacing the file structure path. If someone is aware of a module doing what this does, let me know.

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

Reviews

The module, written by Scot Hubbard of Base One Ltd, simplifies adding reviews to site content. Reviews can be configured per content type. For those of us who have had to jump through hoops using the Voting API paired with node references and creation of a “review” content type, this is definitely a breath of fresh air and I am betting the Reviews modules will quickly grow in popularity!

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

Role Delay

The module, created by World Fallz, allows a Drupal site to automatically promote a user from a basic “Authenticated user” role (which might not have many permissions at all) to a more trusted role after a period of time and then further promote their permissions (role) after another period of time.

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

Save Form State

Categories: Content

The module, coded by John Youssef of JesoX, provides “autosave” functionality in Drupal forms. Woohoo! You’ll need to add some additional jQuery libraries and do a bit of configuration, but this definitely does look promising.

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

TagCanvas tagcanvas.png

The module, written by Chin Kiong Ng of MyFineJob.com, integrates the TagCanvas library, which uses the HTML5 Canvas to build one of those fancy new 3D animated tag clouds, similar to what Cumulus does, but without using Flash (thank God!). It depends on the Tagadelic module, used by over 30,000 Drupal sites and I can only imagine that TagCanvas could quickly gain thousands of installations.

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

Template Field Variables
This is a utility module for themers. Its only purpose is to make Drupal template development less painful. It has no front-end. It stores no data. It implements no hooks.

Categories:

The module, by Jeremy Epstein, is a nifty new theming tool which takes the pain out of theming fieldable entities. Variables hidden in the massive nested arrays are moved into simple variables. It works on all core content types and fields as well as many fields and content types provided by the most popular contributed modules (link, email, date, reference, etc). This should make theming a bit less headache and a bit more fun. Yay!

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

Tooltip Field Formatter

Categories:

The module, developed by Marc van Gend, uses BeautyTips to provide a nice display of field contents when you mouse over an appropriate icon or other trigger. Nicely done, Marc!

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

Users Export

The module, created by Aaron Klump of In the Loft Studios, is a lean module with basic features for exporting common fields from the user table into common formats (e.g. CSV). It has an API which developers can use to extend the set of fields that it can export.

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

Views iCal

The module, developed by Max Rakhimov, allows you to create iCal feeds of events from Views, simply and easily.

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

Workbench Moderation Notes

Categories: Utility

The module, by Kevin Miller of Cal State Monterey Bay, provides a “Notes” field to display comments attached to changes in the moderation state of content revisions managed by Workbench Moderation; it improves communication in the editorial workflow process.

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

Xtools

The module, by Bart Feenstra, is yet another module for to help developers test the modules they are writing. It allows developers to create “blueprints” against which input and output is checked. I look forward to see how this develops and to giving it a go.

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

Original Post: 

About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web