There are tons of new Drupal modules that got released in August; almost 200 module project pages were created. Some of them aren’t listed here because they currently have no release; some don’t even have code (yet). But a lot of very promising modules were released in August, perhaps due to the extra community involvement around DrupalCon Munich. There were even a couple novelty modules, good for a laugh if not much else: the Honey Badger module (“Honey badger don't care. Honey badger always clears cache.”), contributed by Camilla Krag Jensen of the Danish news site, Dagbladet Information , is one such module worth looking at if you need something to make you smile. The module, by Sally Young of Lullabot , “randomly swaps values of the variable table around.” Well, maybe it would if there were actually any code behind the project. Both require Bad Judgement . I suppose the latter project page could have been created for a new Lullabot training, but I’m curious what inspired Ms Jensen. Anyway, the women of Drupal came through with some laughs.
A more useful looking set of modules was also released in August by French developer, Guillaume Viguier-Just : The module is required for any of its related modules, which include Base Page , Base Article , Base Link , Base Media , and Base Apps . These modules are “… meant to be a set of features that will provide the "lowest common denominator" for building Drupal apps and distributions.” The Base modules depend on Apps Compatible , another new module from August which I think will be in very wide use before long (Apps Compatible is covered below ). There are also a couple new modules for the Spark distribution (listed below), several new Drush extensions, and a number of other modules which look good for boosting developer/themer productivity.
As with previous editions of this article, all modules are listed in alphabetical order. If categories were missing on the Drupal.org project page, I’ve added appropriate categories. Additional caveat: I have not tested all of these modules and have not fully tested any of them. They are new modules and some come with new bugs, so beware.
Anonymous login
The module, authored by Mike Stefanello and sponsored by Workout Spots , provides a login page with redirect to the originally requested page if an anonymous visitor to your site follows a link which requires higher privileges. The example use case is your site sends out emails with links which require a user is logged in; but subscribers to your email list get an “Access denied” when following the links (if not already logged in); a usability nightmare. Anonymous login to the rescue! Very nice.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Apps compatible
As well as providing methods for shared components, Apps compatible includes a collection of methods handy for developing interoperable features and apps.
The module, by Nedjo Rogers , is already reported in use on 278 sites, which shows there must be a use case for this module that was only released a month ago; I anticipate a lot more sites will be using it shortly. It helps alleviate compatibility issues between different Apps and Features caused by conflicting dependencies, etc.
Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.
Backup and Migrate SFTP
The module, by Chad Robinson , extends the very popular Backup & Migrate module with SFTP, instead of simply FTP when setting up “Destinations”. This is a GoodThing™ for security. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this.
Status: There are dev releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.
Better Statistics
The module, authored by Eric Peterson of Tableau Software, extends the core Statistics module and collects additional data such as cache status and user agent without adding a lot of extra performance overhead. This could certainly be useful.
Status: There are stable releases available for Drupal 6 and 7.
Block Upload
The module, created by Alexander of ADCI, LLC , provides a simple block with an uploader for the node permissions
Status: There are stable releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.
Book Title Override
The module, written by Bryan Ollendyke of Penn State University , allows you to change the titles displayed in Drupal’s “Book” navigation so they don’t have to be an exact match to the constituent node titles. This eliminates one limitation that many might have been frustrated by.
Status: There are beta releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.
Chamfer defaults
The module, also by Bryan Ollendyke maintains the default settings for the Chamfer theme, an Omega sub-theme with full HTML5 adaptive theme originally used for presenting online courses on the Penn State site (and another contribution from Ollendyke). It allows you to easily move defaults or your settings from one site to another.
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7 and a development release available for Drupal 6.
Close Block
Categories: Content
The module, is another contribution by Alexander of ADCI, LLC. It allows users to close any block configured to be user-closable. Blocks can be configured to stay closed or reopen the next time a page with that block is displayed, be displayed a certain number of times before closing is permanent, or re-appear after a period of time. There are global settings, per-theme settings, and settings in the configuration for each block.
Status: There are stable releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.
Configuration Interchange and Management
The module, coded by Thomas Fini Hansen of Reload! , is the first module I’ve seen which works with the new Drupal 8 Configuration Management system. Of course it’s still early for Drupal 8, so it goes without saying that all features are experimental, but this is intended to provide a simple way to save snapshots of configuration settings, roll back to snapshots, and deploy snapshots from one site to another. This could find a place in core by the time of “feature freeze ”.
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 8.
Cron Cache
The module, written by Will Vincent of Marker Seven , allows individual caches to be cleared at configurable intervals.
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.
CSS Flipper
The module, written by Tsachi Shlidor , can automatically create and maintain a “flipped version” of any RTL or LTR CSS code, which can greatly streamline developing and maintaining themes. Nice!
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
Dev Tools
The module, produced by Yuriy Babenko of Suite101 , is “a collection of PHP
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.
Disable "Language neutral"
The module, written by rysmax , allows you to show only a sub-set of otherwise-allowable language options for each content-type, which means you can remove such nonsense as “language neutral” from the selectable languages for a Blog entry… Nice and simple, and most content types on most multilingual sites would probably benefit from this.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Dismiss
The module, produced by Chris Ruppel of Four Kitchens , allows you to “click away” Drupal messages so that they are out of your way without a page refresh. It’s a simple module with no configuration, but it could be handy for when you are documenting the steps of a process and end up with Drupal messages displayed that might distract from a screenshot.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Drupal-up
The module, written by Kosta Harlan of DesignHammer , is “a Drush extension that facilitates building virtual machines for local development of Drupal sites.” It includes blueprints for virtual machines for hosting Drupal 6–8 -based sites. Looks interesting.
Status: There is a beta release available “for Drupal 7” (presumably, like Drush, the Drupal version is not really applicable).
Drush Hosts
The module, written by Christopher Gervais of Koumbit.org , provides Drush commands for managing /etc/hosts, so you can easily add and remove entries. This definitely looks useful.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Drush Issue Queue Commands
The module, produced by Greg Anderson , is a Drush extension which includes commands which help manage a Drupal project issue queue, making things simpler for beginners and faster for everyone. I’m sold!
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Entity RDF
The module, developed by Stéphane Corlosquet , the primary maintainer of Drupal’s core RDF, is a replacement for Drupal core RDF, which provides tight integration between the RDF mappings and Entity API and attempts to solve shortcomings of the Drupal 7 core RDF module. This is worth keeping an eye on.
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.
Feeds YouTube Fetcher
The module, contributed by Travis Tidwell of AllPlayers.com and sponsored by Anglican TV , is a YouTube feeds fetcher which is able to overcome the situation where feeds are paginated, thus getting all of the videos in a feed rather than just the first 50. This could well be useful.
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.
Flag expire
The module, by Joachim Noreiko , can use either the Date or Time period module to create flags which can be active for a preset period of time or which begin/end at specified times.
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
Flatfish
The module, developed by Mike Crittenden of Drupal Connect , uses the Ruby gem, Flatfish , to help scrape HTML data and import it into a Drupal site, useful, for instance when migrating an older website into Drupal. It includes other code to help with the migration of the data. I know there are other popular modules for this kind of task, but this could also be worth keeping in mind.
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
Icon fonts
The module, created by Gábor Hojtsy of Acquia as part of the Spark distribution definitely looks interesting. Icon fonts allow you to easily change size, shape, color, strokes and other attributes. See this CSS Tricks post about icon fonts for an example of how useful they can be as a replacement for standard icons.
Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.
Image CAPTCHA Refresh
The module, produced by Dmitry Drozdik of VolcanoIdeas, helps with one of the problems of Captcha; if the image is “too easy”, bots can parse the Captcha—too hard and humans have a hard time and might need to refresh the page a few times, which can be a real hassle if they have completely filled out a form. This brings in a feature that is missing in some Captcha plugins: the ability to get a new Captcha without refreshing the whole page and should result in less frustration for users and a lighter load on your server.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Leaflet More Maps
The module, created by Rik de Boer of flink , expands your mapping horizons beyond Google maps, allowing you to include maps from a variety of alternative map providers, such as the watercolor-effect maps from Stamen or the trail and cycling maps from Thunderforest . As its name implies, it also depends on the Leaflet Javascript library .
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
LGP
The module, which stands for “Lazy Guinea Pig”, created by develCuy and sponsored by dilygent , is another developer toolset which will help you debug your Drupal code. It can write to a temporary log file, works in places where Devel ’s dsm() won’t, and has a number of other features that make me think this is worth knowing about. It also includes a number of Drush commands.
Status: There are development releases available for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.
Logic Block
The module, produced by Pat Lockley , provides a number of configuration options for blocks to allow site administrators to easily perform such actions as merging blocks, replacing one block with another in particular circumstances (e.g. if one block is empty or based on language, role, user ID, etc), and other nifty tricks. I’ve only just experimented with it a bit, but it definitely looks useful.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Mobile friendly navigation toolbar
Categories: Mobile
The module, produced by Gábor Hojtsy of Acquia , is another module developed and released as part of the Spark distribution . As the name implies, it provides a better toolbar for mobile navigation. Like the rest of Spark, it provides a way for us to test and use awesome new Drupal 8 features in our Drupal 7 projects. Very nice!
Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.
Module configure links
The module, by Brad Erickson of ChapterThree , helps solve a typical Drupal problem, especially common when working on sites with a lot of modules: you enable a new module, but then need to search around to find its configuration page. This module presents obvious links for configuring any modules activated, for a smoother Drupal site-building workflow. If only one module is activated, it automatically redirects you to the configuration page for that module. I’ve tried it, I like it, and I’ll definitely be using it on more than just my local “module testing” site.
Status: There are stable releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.
OpenFolio Features
OpenFolio is a distribution for photographers or other visual artists who want to create a web portfolio of their work.
The module, developed by Ted Bowman of Six Mile Tech , was released as part of the OpenFolio distribution , also released by Mr Bowman in August. it contains no custom code, but handy exported content types, Views displays, Panels, and other useful bits to help streamline the process of creating an online portfolio site to display visual art. Of course it depends on Features .
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.
OpenLayers Filters
The module, by Pol Dell'Aiera , provides a text filter which replaces a token representing any OpenLayers map preset with the map, right within your content.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Override css
The module, authored by Wim De Craene of Jeugdwerknet vzw , provides a simpler alternative to Sweaver or Livethemer which allows a client/administrator to make simple changes to site CSS, e.g. changing the color of H1 and H2 headings, through a simple UI, without even having to know any HTML or CSS.
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.
Panels Extra Styles
The module, coded by Sean Dunaway provides additional region and pane styles for Panels with full HTML5 support. Since users are also encouraged to contribute their own styles, the options should increase with time. This looks well worth trying out if you are using Panels.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Pathinfo
The module, authored by Cameron Tod of NBC Universal, is a Devel plugin which displays useful information about which module and function is responsible for the page you are viewing. It links the appropriate Drupal API pages, where applicable, and displays full Krumo output for page arguments. This looks handy for those times you need to fix some issues in a Drupal site, but have no idea where things are coming from.
Status: There are beta releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.
Required by role
The module, written by Alejandro Tabares , simply adds some extra checkboxes to each field configuration form so that you can not only specify that a field is required (for all roles), but can instead specify that a field is required only for particular roles. I suppose the use cases for this are not so common, but I’m sure I’ve had at least one situation where this would have been useful.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Resolve IP
The module, by Yannis Karampelas of Netstudio , is simple, but very useful for understanding what’s going on in the system log (Watchdog) entries: it resolves the hostname for each IP address so you see (for example) crawl-66-249-66-212.googlebot.com alongside the IP address.
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
Responsive Background Images
The module, is yet another contribution in the same vein as other modules recently released by Daniel Honrade of Promet Solutions . It provides a range of rules for background image sizes, which it loads based on the size of the browser window. Phones get a smaller background image than iPads, which get a smaller image size than a full-size browser window on an HD monitor. This, of course, helps conserve mobile bandwidth which helps make your whole site more “responsive”.
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.
Search API Extended String Filter
Did you ever want to be able to search partial string using the search API from within views, now you can, supports all the regular (exposed) filters and also 'Starts with', 'Contains', …
The module, contributed by Jelle Sebreghts of Attiks , enables searching for partial strings with the full Views search filters.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Search API stats
The module, authored by Brandon Stone of ImageX Media , provides a block which allows users to see your site’s top search phrases. Of course there is a bit more to getting this working than simply adding and enabling the module, but for a search-related module, this looks relatively easy to get working.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Searchcloud Block
The module, developed by Fabian de Rijk of Finalist , is similar to Search API Stats (above). Instead of a block with a simple list of most-searched terms, it provides a block with a “cloud” of those search terms.
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.
Services Entity API
The module, created by Pedro Cambra of Commerce Guys , provides integration of Services and Entity API . It was developed with the needs of Drupal Commerce users in mind, but can be used for any Drupal entities.
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.
Setup
Categories: Utility
The module, developed by Stuart Clark of Realityloop , gives developers and “adventurous site builders” a way to create a script for a client with a series of steps to enter their personal data (e.g. social networking accounts, Google Analytics tracking codes, etc); information which might not have been available during the development process.
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
Simple Editor
The module, contributed by Ki H. Kim of Urban Insight , provides an almost-completely pre-configured WYSIWYG editor, based on TinyMCE. The aim is to give users a Wordpress-like, “ready-to-use”, editor, and not to be super-flexible, but if the common use case assumed applies to you, this could be a great time-saver.
Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.
Simple oEmbed
Categories: Media
The module, also by Ki H. Kim , integrates a simple setup of oEmbed with the Simple Editor, to make it easy to add videos and other rich media to content. Like the Simple Editor, it assumes a lot of the configuration, so for less typical use cases, you might want to use the full oEmbed project, which provides additional configuration options.
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
Taxonomy Group Fields
, by Chris Albrecht of the National Renewable Energy Lab , is a taxonomy selection “widget” intended for larger vocabularies, currently those with two levels of hierarchy (parents and children, but no “grandparents” or “grandchildren”), however the project page indicates that there is an interest in expanding to multiple hierarchy levels, among a number of other useful features. Currently, if a parent is selected, all of its children are automatically included (parent acts as “select all” for children), but the developer also indicates he would like to provide this behavior as an option, rather than as the “only way”. This module is similar to one of my favorite, not-yet-for-D7 taxonomy selection/management tools, Taxonomy Super Select . What TGF lacks (a feature in TSS) is the ability to add new terms; I think it would be cool if it supported adding a new term into any group (with role-based limits on adding new terms). But there are so many use cases for Taxonomy widgets that it’s probably best to just create a limited module that does one thing well rather than trying to be everything for everyone.
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.
Taxonomy Orphanage
The module, coded by Elliott Foster of Four Kitchens , is a module that helps resolve a rather painful bug in Drupal core. If you delete a taxonomy term, references to it still are retained in entities which used it. Taxonomy Orphanage provides interfaces for cleaning up such references. Nice work, Elliott!
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
Theme Hider
The module, authored by Victor Quinn , provides a method for site administrators to hide particular themes on sites where users are allowed to select their preferred theme. Some enabled themes might only be for admin or for special purposes, so this is a good thing to have if you want your site to be displayed nicely for everyone.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 6.
tinynav.js
The module is another contribution from Bryan Ollendyke . It integrates the tinynav.js jQuery library , which converts a typical list-based menu into a select-list drop-down if the browser window is narrow (e.g. on smaller displays). It’s extremely light-weight at only 362 bytes (minimized and gzipped). This module provides a number of configuration options and was designed for use with the Chamfer theme , but also should work well with other Omega -based themes (what it’s been tested with) and possibly other themes. Looks good!
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
URL Alias Permissions
The module, written by Justin Phelan of Blackwood Media Group , “allows site administrators to set permissions to create and edit url path settings by content type”. This is certainly useful for particular use cases.
Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.
User Import Framework Plus
The module, written by Deji Akala of JB Global , extends the User Import Framework to allow importing more than just the basic three fields (email, username, password) the UIF supports. This certainly looks like it could be useful.
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.
Visual select file
The module, coded by Rudie Dirkx of ezCompany , is simpler than Media and easier to extend, plus it includes visuals (thumbnails) to help you select files. It uses Views and FileField Sources to help it work its magic. Nicely done!
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
Webform Email Raw
Emailing raw, unfiltered (filter_xss) data from a Webform submission can be risky, so only use this module if you absolutely require this behavior and understand the risks.
Categories: Mail
The module, contributed by Robert Bates of Phase2 Technology , provides a solution for sending raw, unfiltered XML from Webform submissions.
Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.
Webform Serial
Categories: Content
The module, developed by Peter Lieverdink of Creative Contingencies , simply “provides an auto-incrementing number field for webforms .”
Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.
WireDocs
… a large legacy of documents in proprietary formats, such as MS Word or Excel, may discourage from moving to an online editor. Additionally, legal issues might arise if confidential files are hosted by a third party service provider.
The module, from Gottfried Nindl of OSCE , allows your Drupal site to host files in various office formats which can be opened (seamlessly downloaded and opened by a native, local application), edited, and saved (seamlessly uploaded back to the server) with a Java applet that bridges the gap between Drupal and the client operating systems. This looks like a pretty cool alternative to third-party document-hosting systems.
Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.
