Building Your Website: Drupal Modules
Posted Oct 18, 2005 - 01:58 PM
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"Drupal Modules can add a lot of powerful features in your website which sometimes cannot be found even in some of the best commercial content management systems."
There are plenty of Drupal Modules that you can install for your site as add-ons. What we liked best about Drupal modules is that it already comes pre-shipped with several modules. So a standard distribution contains several useful modules that you can simple point, click and enable.
Some examples of such pre-shipped modules are: archive that displays a calendar to navigate old content, book which allows users to collaboratively author a book, forums for threaded discussions about general topics, paths that enable renaming URLs for search engines, polls to capture votes on different topics in the form of multiple choice questions, and much more.
You can also download many user contributed modules from the Drupal site that are not pre-shipped in the standard distribution. You can see the full list of modules at: http://drupal.org/project/Modules. Here are some modules that we found interesting:
* API: This is an implementation of a subset of the Doxygen documentation generator specification, tuned to produce output that best benefits the Drupal code base. This module was designed to produce the Drupal developer documentation available at drupaldocs.org.
http://drupal.org/node/6018
* Banner: The banner.module allows you to display ads on your Drupal website. It randomly displays the banners, and automatically tracks how many times each is displayed and clicked. Users of your website can be given ownership of banners, and be allowed to modify certain settings and view statistics. Supports numerous graphic formats, flash animations, and text.
http://drupal.org/project/banner
* Chatbox: This is a simple chatbox module. It allows your site's visitors to chat in an HTML interface.
http://drupal.org/project/chatbox
* Database Administration: The dba module provides Drupal administrators with direct access to their Drupal database tables from within the standard Drupal user interface. It is possible to execute scripts to create and alter tables, to backup one or more tables, to view/edit/delete data within tables, and to emtpy or drop tables. If using MySQL, it is also possible to check and repair tables.
http://drupal.org/project/dba
* E-Commerce: A collection of modules used to sell goods and/or services. Some features include:
o Subscriptions and recurring payments
o Sell file downloads, shippable items, and even collections of various products as a single item
o Inventory management enabled on a per-product basis
o Payment and shipping components are 'pluggable'. The system can use Paypal, authorize.net or you can roll your own.
o Invoice generation and shipping notifications for tangible products
o Shopping cart and product 'look and feel' are themeable
o Transaction reports and sales summaries
o Transaction and payment workflow
o Customers can review their order history.
o Dynamically adjust item prices for a given group of users
o Run an auction site with the contributed auction module.
http://drupal.org/project/ecommerce
* Event: This is a simple module to keep track of events and show them to users.
http://drupal.org/project/event
* FCKeditor for Drupal: This module allows Drupal to replace textarea fields with FCKeditor. This HTML text editor brings to the web many of the powerful functionalities of known desktop editors like Word. It's really lightweight and doesn't require any kind of installation on the client computer. NOTE: FCKeditor for Drupal relies on an external library called fckeditor. For further information please refer to: http://www.fckeditor.net
http://drupal.org/node/16118
* Glossary: Glossary helps newbies understand the jargon which always crops up when specialists talk about a topic. Doctors discuss CBC and EKG and CCs. Web developers keep talking about CSS, P2P, XSLT, etc. The glossary module scans posts for glossary terms (including synonyms). The glossary indicator is inserted after every found term, or the term itself is turned into an indicator depending on the site settings. By hovering over the indicator, users may learn the definition of that term. The glossary uses Drupal's built in taxonomy feature, so you can organize your terms in a Drupal vocabulary. This allows you to create hierarchical structures, synonyms and relations. Glossary terms are represented with the taxonomy terms in the glossary vocabulary. This module also works with nicelinks.module, which will give you pretty hover-over glossary term descriptions on reasonably modern browsers (while degrading properly on older ones).
http://drupal.org/project/glossary
* Image: This module allow users with proper permissions to upload images into drupal. Thumbnails are created automaticaly. Images could be posted individualy to the front page, included in stories or grouped in galleries. Galleries are either personal, i.e linked to a user, or global to the drupal site. Admin could administer images and set various parameters such as, among others, maximum image size, permissions to access images or manipulate them. This module requires ImageMagick, GD or ImLib2.
http://drupal.org/project/image
* Instant messenger: This is a small instant messenger module. It allows registered, active users to send short messenges to each other. The Instant Messages are sent via a messaging block that allows you to select the user and then send a message to that user. The message appears at the top of the next page viewed by that user. http://drupal.org/node/14553
* paypal framework: Paypal IPN framework logging. This modules purpose is to remove alot of the bloat from "paypal aware" modules I have seen contributed to CVS lately. This module handles filtering and high performance logging to a relational database so that other module developers can use this "in place" database to handle events, track payments, calculate totals, ship packages, and whatever else the module developer can think of to do with the data. The module comes with filters, 'Verification Queueing', and a few other neat features. If planning to write a module that will use PayPal's Instant payment notifications, then you might want to investigate this module before re-inventing the wheel.
http://drupal.org/project/paypal_framework
* Print Friendly Pages: Generate printer friendly pages for all node types. Features include the ability to explicitly list all URL references made on the page, custom stylesheet and HTML template and complete control of the node elements that are visible when the page is rendered.
http://drupal.org/project/print
* webform: This module adds a webform nodetype to your Drupal site. A webform can be a questionnaires, contact or request form. These can be used by visitor to make contact or to enable a more complex survey that the type polls enable. Submissions from a webform are saved in a database table and can optionaly also be mailed to an e-mail address upon submission.
http://drupal.org/node/7404
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Author: Sanjib Ahmad, Freelance Writer and Product Consultant for Business.Marc8.com - Top 10 Business Best Sellers. You are free to use this article in its entirety as long as you leave all links in place, do not modify the content, and include the resource box listed above. |
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