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Modules of the Month: July - A big crop of interesting new Drupal modules

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Modules of the month story banner illustration.

July saw a bumper crop of interesting new modules contributed, many of them with already-stable Drupal 7 releases. The kind of modules being released now also seems to be indicative of Drupal 7’s level of maturity. We are no longer seeing the modules which fill gaping holes in the standard feature-set, but now we are seeing loads of performance-enhancements, accessibility improvements, productivity tools for Drupal developers, backports of Drupal 8 awesomeness, mobile theming augmentation, and integrations with non-PHP-based systems, just to name a few of the common categories that seem to be trending at this point in the release cycle. And the mainstay modules that have had some major issues have almost entirely been released in stable versions (but they are not within the remit of this article). Yes, things are looking good.

Indeed, there are so many interesting new modules this month, that it’s harder than ever to choose which ones are worthy of profiling here, so the list is quite a bit longer than normal. I hope you are as excited as I am to see all the cool stuff that’s now easier-than-ever to do with your Drupal-based site.

As usual, this list does not include most “integration modules” for fee-based commercial services and likewise leaves out modules which, at time of review, did not have an official release of any kind. Modules for very “niche” audiences (such as those for integration of regional services) are also omitted, among others which seemed a bit too complicated to provide a short explanation of what they bring to the table. It’s possible some of these more complex modules might be covered in separate articles, though.

Enough with the caveats and chit-chat… let’s look at the modules!

Accessible Skip Links
Add link to copied text

Categories: JavaScript Utilities, SEO

The Add link to copied text module, written by Andrew Berezovsky of Axel Springer Russia, requires adding the jQuery addtocopy add-on to your site, but once that’s available and this module is enabled, text copied from your site will include a link to the page where it came from, so it will make it easier for would-be plagiarists to give credit where credit is due and for students and researchers to collect attribution along with information.

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

Alternative Database Cache

Categories: Performance and Scalability

If you know much about Drupal’s native caching system, you probably know there is room for improvement. The Alternative Database Cache module, written by Eric Peterson of Tableau Software helps fill the gaps by providing more options and enhancements, thus helping prevent the negative impact on performance that comes with the default core functionality.

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

Apache Solr Config Generator
Article Jump

Categories: JavaScript Utilities, Site Navigation

The Article Jump module, written by Bart Lantz, allows for configuration of hotkeys to scroll forward and backward through a list of articles; I could try to further describe how it works, but there is a very cool demo site linked on the project page. You’ll just need to add the Libraries module, if you aren’t already using it, drop in a small Javascript file, and this module should be ready for use.

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

Awkward Showcase

Categories: Fields, JavaScript Utilities, Views

The Awkward Showcase module, written by Carson Black of BCI Interactive, integrates the oddly-named Awkward jQuery plug-in, which seems to be anything but awkward. The Awkward demo site is one of the coolest things I’ve seen! There are so many options for the slideshow and presentation of information that it’s sure to amaze even the most jaded web users. Once you try this, you’ll be wanting to make all kinds of awkward sites!

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

Better Revisions

Categories: Administration, Content, Utility

The Better Revisions module, by Roy Baxter, is well worth using. It replaces the text area, where users are expected to explain their content revisions, with a simple select list to make it easy for people to consistently provide a simple reason for their edits. This should help boost your editorial staff’s productivity, too!

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

Block ARIA Landmark Roles

Categories: Content, Content Display

The Block ARIA Landmark Roles module, produced by Oliver Davies, is yet another module aimed at improving Drupal’s support for accessibility standards. If you aren’t familiar with ARIA landmark roles, the article I’ve just linked from the W3C should help. In short, it provides better support for Drupal’s theming layer for people using assistive technologies and that’s definitely a GoodThing™!.

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

Blockexport

Categories: Features Package

The Blockexport module, written by Washim Ahmed of Ericsson India Global Services Pvt Ltd, is a Features add-on which helps gather all your custom blocks and makes them exportable. Cool beans!

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

Block Lazyloader

Categories: Content Display, JavaScript Utilities, Mobile, Performance and Scalability, Theme Enhancements, Third-party Integration, Utility

The Block Lazyloader module, produced by Daniel Honrade of Promet Solutions, helps boost your page loads, but is best described with its demo. It’s one of the modules released this month which should help with your site’s performance and definitely has a coolness factor, too. It’s certainly worth giving a try.

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

Breakpoints

Categories: FieldsContent Display, Mobile

The Breakpoints module, written by Belgian star contributor Peter Droogmans of Attiks, provides support for responsive images and styles, setting minimum widths for various content elements and screens.

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

Browscap Block & Browscap CTool

Categories: Content Display, Mobile, Utility

The Browscap Block and Browscap CTools modules, both contributed by Jeff Burnz of Adaptivethemes, give you the ability to show or hid blocks or panels, depending on the device. These modules fall squarely into the category of mobile theme enhancements.

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

Class Loader

Categories: Developer

The Class Loader module, developed by Daniel F. Kudwien of unleashed mind, allows developers to take advantage of some of the benefits of lazy-loading classes provided by Symfony. It’s a direct back-port from Drupal 8.

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

Clean missing modules
Comments as Block

Categories: Content Display

As the name implies, the Comments as Block module, created by Solomon Gifford, allows you to put comments on content into a block which can be placed wherever you like, rather than placed with node content. This could be very handy!

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

Commerce Donate

Categories: Commerce/Advertising

The Commerce Donate module, contributed by Stella Power of Annertech, perhaps best known by developers for her “stellar” work on the Coder module, but also a key figure behind the Lightbox2 and FAQ, among others, is a useful module for allowing visitors to make donations and manages them in a simple Commerce checkout process.

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

Commerce Product Popularity
Configuration builder
Contact Info

Categories: Location

The Contact Info module, developed by Daniel Boulet, is a simple module which allows a Drupal site builder to fill in a form with their contact details and it provides an hCard-formatted block that you can place wherever you want. Looks pretty nifty!

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

Context Disable Context
Diskfree

Categories: Security, Utility

The Diskfree module, created by super-contributor David Norman of Classic Graphics, provides a warning if your Drupal server’s remaining drive space drops below a configurable level.

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

Drupal Hybrid Computing

Categories: Developer, Drush, Import/Export, Statistics, Third-party Integration, Utility

The Drupal Hybrid Computing module, written by Daniel Zhou of University of Michigan School of Information, gives your Drupal site an easy way to integrate non-PHP-based services, such to access JDBC-based data, Apache Mahout, or many other systems used for data mining, statistical analysis, visualization, etc. It’s fairly complex and still under active development, so it’s probably best to just look at the project page for more information, but this definitely does look like it could be a real winner!

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

Drush CTools Export Bonus
Entity JSON

Categories: Content Display

The Entity JSON module, by Ian Carrico, provides an API for allowing Drupal entities, configurable per-entity, to be displayed as JSON output. This could certainly be useful.

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

EPUB Export

Categories: Content

The EPUB Export module, written by Jeff Graham of FunnyMonkey, provides a method for allowing you to output EPUB 3.0 documents from content on your site. There are libraries to add and a number of configuration steps, so don’t expect this to be a simple drop-in-and-export process, but it does look very useful.

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

Exam

Categories: Content

The Exam module, coded by Svein-Tore Griff With, provides a method for allowing an educational site to be used in “exam mode” to test students. This looks particularly interesting for Drupal sites for universities or other educational institutions.

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

Field instance cardinality

Categories: Fields

The Field instance cardinality module, created by Joachim Noreiko, allows fields with multiple options to be limited according to specific instances, so a field that might be a select list in one place could be displayed as a single option (checkbox), in another. It’s very useful, even if the purpose is not immediately clear by the module name—this should probably be in “core”.

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

Field Rules

Categories: Fields, Rules

The Field Rules module, authored by Mitchell Tannenbaum, has such a simple description, it’s probably best I just quote it:

Provides Rules integration for creating fields, field instances, and node types.

I think I’ll have to try this out to really understand it, but the maintainer has been involved in the Rules project for a long time, so I suspect this is worthwhile, too.

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

fieldscheduler

Categories: Fields

The fieldscheduler module, written by Rajan Mayekar, allows individual fields, rather than just content, to have start and expiration dates, so you can control when a field will be visible.

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

File Checker

Categories: File Management

The File Checker module, produced by Gottfried Nindl of OSCE, helps identify missing files in your Drupal files directory so that you can remedy the situation. Stuff happens and modules like this can help you to be aware of the problem.

Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 6. And there is some discussion in the issue queue about a D7 port, too.

Flag Follow

Categories: ContentCommunity

The Flag Follow module, created by Chhavi Kaushik of Srijan Technologies, India, uses the Heartbeat and Flag modules to provide a system for tracking the activities of other authenticated users in a Drupal system.

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

Form API Helper

Categories: Developer

The Form API Helper module, developed by Noah Lively, helps simplify the creation of forms with the Form API. It’s a developer productivity tool that certainly looks promising.

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

Form Builder Field

Categories: Content, Content Display, Fields, Mail

The Form Builder Field uses the Form Builder module for the ability to build forms on a entity basis.

The Form Builder Field module, coded by Neil Hastings of Phase2 Technology, is another interesting module to help with forms. I’m not sure I really understand how this is supposed to work, but given Phase2’s involvement, I trust this is well worth experimenting with.

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

Geo-comments
Geofield Gmap
Grid builder

Categories: Administration

The Grid builder module, developed by Gábor Hojtsy of Acquia, is a part of Spark which has been made generic enough that it could be useful for other use cases. It helps with grid layouts. From what I’ve seen, anything in Spark is going to be awesome and I’m sure this is no exception!

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

Hide the Toolbar

Categories: Administration

The Hide the Toolbar module, created by Oliver Davies, is one I have not yet tried, but will certainly use since I’m a big fan of the Administrator Menu and this module automagically hides the built-in toolbar for anyone who has access to the Admin Menu. Normally, I just turn off the Toolbar module and activate Admin menu, but this module would be useful for the situations where you still want the Toolbar to be available to other users.

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

Image Lazyloader

Categories: Content Display, File Management, JavaScript Utilities, Media, Mobile, Performance and Scalability, Theme Enhancements, Utility

The Image Lazyloader module is another release by Daniel Honrade of Promet Solutions. It helps your site load more quickly by lazy-loading images as they become visible in the browser window. In other words, a long page with lots of images will load the top images first and if you quickly jump to the bottom, it will load the images there, etc. Nice one… did I mention it looks very cool, too? It has a nice “loading” spinner in the spots for each image before they load up.

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

Inference Rules

Categories: Content, RDF, Rules

The Inference Rules module, is another Rules-related module by Mitchell Tannenbaum and it definitely looks interesting, albeit complex. It provides a system for discovering relationships between between content; how this works and what it’s suited for is a topic suitable for a much longer article than this one, perhaps, but reading the project description might give you some ideas.

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

Interactive Information Bar
Internet Defense League
IP Geolocation Block
Javascript Tool

Categories: Administration

The Javascript Tool module, written by Washim Ahmed of Ericsson India Global Services, uses the codemirror library to allow site administrators to directly edit any Javascript files on a Drupal site. Too cool! Of course this also requires the Libraries module, but you already use that, don’t you?

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

JpGraph

Categories: Import/Export, Statistics

The JpGraph module, produced by Pol Dell'Aiera uses the Libraries module to integrate the JpGraph library into your Drupal site so that you can do all kinds of cool graphing.

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

jQuery Countdown Timer

Categories: JavaScript Utilities

The jQuery Countdown Timer module, developed by Marcin Pajdzik, is a simple and light-weight module for displaying a block with a count-down for any significant event. It uses only jQuery and CSS (no images) and looks sharp. Take a look at the demo.

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

JUpload

Categories: File Management, Media, Third-party Integration, Utility

The JUpload module, written by Kevin Reynen of makedatamakesense, allows you to upload HUGE files to your Drupal site and does so by integrating the GPL-licensed JUpload Java application, so you can upload massive video files that are larger than 2GB, for example. It uses FTP rather than HTTP post to eliminate issues with PHP’s maximum upload limits. Clearly this isn’t for every site, but it looks very useful for certain use cases.

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

Language Selection Page

Categories: Multilingual

This is useful in situations where you don't want to enforce a default language to users (e.g. because of political or corporate sensitivities) if they come to your website without a language preference available…

The Language Selection Page module, is another project from Pol Dell'Aiera. It provides a language selection landing-page on your site, based on any languages active in your Drupal installation. I like it.

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

Lazyloaded
Linked Field

Categories: Content

The Linked Field module, developed by Yannick Leyendecker of LOOM GmbH, give you support for a link field, which can accept tokens or URLs to add a link to any image or text field. Nice!

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

Marquee Block

Categories: Commerce/Advertising, Content, Content Display

The Marquee Block module, coded by Noah Lively, gives you a jQuery-based scrolling marquee block that you can place wherever you like and configure with your desired text or HTML. There are controls for speed, scroll direction and other behaviors. It requires the jquery.marquee.js script.

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

MASt

Categories: Mobile

The MASt module, developed by Katherine Bailey of Acquia, provides endpoints for mobile app services so that any remote application, like a mobile app, can construct a content form.

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

Multiupload Filefield Widget

Categories: Fields, File Management

The Multiupload Filefield Widget module, developed by Czövek András of KYbest, allows you to upload groups of files at a time, using the HTML5 “multiple” attribute. Simply enable this module and the core File module and select the “Multiple” widget for any file field.

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

Node Lazyloader
Opinion Monitor

Categories: Content

The Opinion Monitor module, from Austin Goudge of Psycle Interactive, allows you to poll visitors for their opinion as they move through content nodes on your site. This could be very useful for certain use cases.

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

Pull up your pants
Reference Delete

Categories: Content

The Reference Delete module, produced by Antonio Savorelli of Communikitchen, allows you to delete referenced dependent nodes added with the References module whenever a “parent” node or user is deleted, thus preventing you having a bunch of clutter left over that doesn’t make sense on its own.

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

Report spam

Categories: Spam Prevention

The Report spam module, written by Cameron Eagans of Advomatic, was created for Drupal.org and there are plans afoot to port it to Drupal 7, too. Basically, it integrates into the Spam module to allow site users to report comments or content as spam. Depending on the role of the user who reports the spam and number of reports, content receives a “spam value” which can trigger a rule or help you identify bad content and remove or unpublish it.

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

Role activity

Categories: Utility

The Role activity module, developed by Dave Reid, of Palantir, allows you to log the activity of users, on a per-role basis. This could be handy for a number of use cases on community portals or other sites with a number of authenticated users.

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

Rotating Slogan

Categories: Theme Enhancements

The Rotating Slogan module, from Edouard Fajnzilberg of Kernel 42, allows you to configure multiple site names and/or site slogans which are displayed randomly or cycle in a given order. You can see it in action on the demo site—simply refresh the page and watch the site slogan change.

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

Services Rules
Signed Nodes

Categories: Content, User Access & Authentication

The Signed Nodes module, by Muhammad Qandeel Aslam of Saudi Business Machine, allows you to require site users to agree to terms of use in order to access particular nodes. This is useful for non-disclosure agreements, and other such use cases and the agreements can be attached to any node of any type. Each node can have its own specific agreement for a given year.

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

Solr Devel

Categories: Developer, Search

The Solr Devel module, developed by Chris Pliakas of Acquia provides developer tools for working with Apache Solr search. According to the module description, much is planned an there may never be a “stable” release since there will always be more features to add and implement.

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

Taxonomy Term Reference Sortable Widget
Treewalk Previous / Next

Categories: Content Display

The Treewalk Previous / Next module, developed by Andreas Hennings of dqxtech.net, with sponsorship by TeakMoebel.com, provides hierarchical navigation (like a Drupal “book”) for any entity. The forward and backward links are provided by Display Suite, so this is a dependency. It was designed to be used in a Drupal Commerce situation but could b useful for any number of use cases.

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

Upload default avatar (user picture)
Userpoints terms

Categories: TaxonomyCommunity

The Userpoints terms module, written by Eugen, encourages user participation in tagging of content and the creation of new terms for that purpose by awarding user points for these activities. Of course it uses the Userpoints API.

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

Views Chart Tools
Views content DS

Categories: Content DisplayViews

The Views content DS module, is another one from Andreas Hennings of dqxtech.net. It uses Display Suite in integration with Views and helps take the pain out of achieving certain common tasks, such as displaying blocks of “related content” in a node’s sidebar, etc.

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

Views Grouped Table

Categories: Views

The Views Grouped Table module, authored by Joachim Noreiko, is simple but sweet. In the example image there are cities and countries with several cites from each country; these are grouped together with only one label for each country rather than saying Frankfurt, Germany; Munich, Germany; Germany, etc. It provides a nicer, less “busy” look.

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

Webform Accordion

Categories: Content DisplayFields

The Webform Accordion module, coded by Shawn Smiley of Achieve Internet, provides jQuery accordion actions for groups of Webform fields. Each Accordion container can hold two or more Accordion tabs. The use of this module with Drupal 7 simply uses the Webform 3.x module. The Drupal 6 version also requires the jQuery UI module.

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

Webform Killswitch

Categories: ContentContent Display

The Webform Killswitch module, contributed by Ben Bunk of Acquia, provides a way to deactivate submission of Webforms when, for example, you wish to migrate a site, disable POSTs for a time, or allow staff to administer Webforms, but block any more submissions for the time-being.

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

XML Field

Categories: Fields

The XML Field module, by Aaron Klump of In the Loft Studios, provides a field where you can enter XML code. This field, like any other, can be added to any fieldable entity and it provides XML validation and sanitized output.

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

YouTube Pull

Categories: Third-party Integration

The YouTube Pull module, authored by CK Ng of MyFineJob.com, provides a a simple way to pull the latest YouTube feeds of content interesting to your site visitors and add it into your Drupal site.

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