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Useful Drupal modules
Click on the module name for notes, comments, patches.
Recommendations (for and against) are my personal opinion only and may be out of date. Feel free to email with corrections/suggestions.
Why doesn't the table mention Drupal 9 or 10?
1. Nowadays, I try and use Drupal as little as possible. Specifically I do not recommend it for a new website. I'd also strongly caution you against choosing Drupal if you're at the beginning of your career and trying to learn web development (front / back / full stack) or just want to manage/maintain a website. More details why by email on request.
2. By February 2022 I'd updated all the sites I look after to Drupal 9 (experience: mixed). As of March 2023, a year later, none of them were fully ready for Drupal 10 (waiting on support for various modules). By 13 Nov 2023 (a week or two after D9 lost support) I had updated a couple of them.
Q: What's the Drupal 9 to 10 upgrade experience like? A: it's what I'd describe as "just bearable", slightly better than D8 to D9, though with plenty of things to still trip you up. There is still deprecated code that needs fixing in D10 modules, and policy changes mean odd things will break (be prepared to turn off Aggregate CSS/JS files if your themes stop working, and note that Drush launcher doesn't work with Drush 12...)
Admittedly the upgrade_status module is the best solution they could have come up with for tracking compatibility. Also watch out for a nasty session headers bug with redirect_after_login.
What about sites still running Drupal 7? In short I still recommend leaving them on Drupal 7 or moving to another platform entirely. My prediction was that Drupal will extend D7 support year after year (note that drupal.org itself is still running D7). It's now been confirmed as 5 Jan 2025. There will have to be some sort of third-party long term support, because of the sheer volume of sites that are not being upgraded.
Your decision is really what specifically you think you will gain from Drupal 8/9/10 - often the answer will be not enough, and one of the main hassles - apart from converting each content type one at a time, and setting up a new theme, will be recreating all your views by hand, as views can't be automatically upgraded.
(134 modules in list)| Name | D8 | Personally Tested Sort ascending | Last Updated |
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| Required by role (required_by_role) | ✔ | ✔ | |
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"Essential" Set required fields more precisely. How to verify it it's in use on any fields (so you can remove it if desired) I wanted to upgrade a site to D10 and there was a dependency from required_by_role on required_api, which was not yet D10 compatible. I wasn't sure if I was even using required_by_role on any fields - turns out I wasn't. There's no admin UI page overview which shows it's use, but you can just run a simple SQL query:select * from config where data like "%required_by_role%"; (the config table is where all your field settings are stored). |
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| Captcha (captcha) | ✔ | ✔ | |
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"Essential" Framework for using (many) different types of captchas on forms such as user_registration. Tested with D7. |
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| Rabbit hole (rabbit_hole) | ✔ | ✔ | |
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Lets you set display, access denied, redirect or programmatic accessing for direct access to nodes. However, note that includes both /node/xxx and the node alias, i.e. you can't just use it to restrict numeric URLs, the human friendly ones will get blocked too - so restrict_node_page_view might be more appropriate. There's a series of submodules (such as rh_node) and without enabling them you won't see any options in the UI. |
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| Views PHP (views_php) | ✖ | ✔ | |
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Allows you to insert a Global PHP field in a view in D7, so you can have conditionals etc. Note there's a bug in 7.x-1.1 (Jan 2022) - you need this patch. (Not available in D8, you should use Twig instead). |
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| Web Profiler (webprofiler) | ✔ | ✔ | |
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"Essential" Install the devel module first. The profile is a toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Features:
Tip: there are further reports ("collectors") you can turn on in the module preferences, and there's a shortcut to these from the menu in the first icon (Drupal logo). The toolbar is only a summary, all icons are clickable to view a full report. Each report is saved in the DB for later reading. This module was ported from Symfony |
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| @font-your-face (fontyourface) | ✔ | ✔ | |
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Not recommended For using typekit, google fonts etc. But it's simpler to do web fonts manually in Twig templates/CSS. 28 Aug 2018: can't be uninstalled cleanly. The method described in #24 here works: https://www.drupal.org/project/fontyourface/issues/2916712#comment-12751073 if for example, you get an "The "font" entity type does not exist." message when running drush cr |
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| Config Ignore (config_ignore) | ✔ | ✔ | |
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"Essential" Selectively ignore configuration entries during an import - e.g. site settings / the system.maintenance message. |
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| Google Authenticator login (ga_login) | ✔ | ✔ | |
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"Essential" Use in conjunction with tfa to support OATH based HOTP/TOTP systems. Nov 2022: No longer needed (i.e. uninstall it) when you upgrade to tfa 2.x for Drupal 9 and 10. |
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| reCAPTCHA (recaptcha) | ✔ | ✔ | |
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"Essential" Use in conjunction with the Captcha module to prevent spam on forms. Tested with D7 and D8. Patch needed for AJAX forms (e.g. Webforms with AJAX support turned on) to stop the ReCAPTCHA UI disappearing when page is reloaded. |
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| Node Page Disable (node_page_disable) | ✖ | ✔ | |
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"Essential" Adds an checkbox labelled 'Retain /node as an active url?' to /admin/config/system/site-information This lets you disable the /node page which would otherwise list all published content. Note it doesn't let you individual disable /node/xxx access by content type - see restrict_node_page_view or rabbit_hole for that. This is for D7 only - in D8 you go to /admin/structure/views and disable /node there. |
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| Simple OAuth (simple_oauth) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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An implementation of OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework RFC - based on a PHP League package. |
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| AddToAny Share Buttons (addtoany) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Nice, clean, SVG sharing buttons. Project page says it's specifically optimised for Drupal. |
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| Autofocus (focus) | ✖ | ✖ | |
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Autofocuses the first field of form (forms can be specified). No sign of a D8 port. |
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| Image Lazyloader (lazyloader) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Images are hidden until they scroll into view. Can specify distance before loading is triggered, also placeholder image, loading GIF and any pages to be excluded. There's been some Drupal 8 development but unclear how complete it is. |
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| Autosave (autosave) | ✖ | ✖ | |
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Saves snapshot of content type form using AJAX. Content types and save frequency can be configured. No sign of a D8 port yet. |
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| Automatic Nodetitles (auto_nodetitle) | ✖ | ✖ | |
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You can hide a node's title field (for reference, every node has to have a title) and generate it automatically, similar to pathauto. No-one's porting this to D8 yet. |
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| Datetime Range (datetime_range) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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"Essential" Now in core, but you need to enable it. Adds an 'all-day' option. |
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| Twig Tweak (twig_tweak) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Adds Twig syntax to insert views, view results, regions, entities (e.g. nodes, blocks, webforms), menus, images, image styles, tokens, breadcrumbs, messages, contextual links and more. |
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| Mollom (mollom) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Deprecated Not recommended DO NOT USE - security issue and Acquia will no longer support or maintain it. Spam filtering SaaS from Acquia. Free for up to 50 "ham" messages a day. Scans message then provides a captcha if appropriate, scores each message for reputation, spam etc. I never tried this module and anecdotally I've seen mixed reports / people suggesting it's not all that good. |
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| Coder (coder) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Checks your code against Drupal coding standards. No need to install this - isn't actually a module, it's a set of phpcs rules installed as standard in /vendor/drupal/coder/coder_sniffer |
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| Block Visibility Groups (block_visibility_groups) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Rather than change visibility for individual blocks, you can group them together and assign complex visibility settings to all of them. Module page promotes it as a simpler alternative to Panels. |
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| Flood Control (flood_control) | ✖ | ✖ | |
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Protect against brute-force login attacks. Unclear what's happening with porting of this. |
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| Feeds (feeds) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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"Essential" As of Sep 2018, up to alpha3 in D8 (but not personally tested). Lets you import CSV/RSS etc. files and various other formats and map them to nodes/user/taxonomy terms, either one-off or periodically. |
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| Alexa (alexa) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Integrates with Amazon Echo. Allows Drupal to respond to Alexa skills requests. See Dries' blog with video demo. |
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| Field collection (field_collection) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Allows you to group a set of fields together. In active development for D8 but still a lot of open bugs at time of writing - project page says it will likely be replaced by Paragraphs. |
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| Refreshless (refreshless) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Only loads the parts of page that change when navigating between pages. Unclear if still being maintained (no updates since Sep 2016) - part of the issue is it requires a core patch. |
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| Trash (trash) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Adds a trash bin for all content, so you may later restore (or permanently delete) it. Depends on Content Moderation module. Alpha in D8. |
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| CKEditor Custom Config (ckeditor_config) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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I've not actually used this but I adapted it's code to enforce a configuration setting (I wanted to remove the HTML dom elements that are shown in the status bar). The module allows you to supply your configuration using the UI. |
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| Node Export (node_export) | ✖ | ✖ | |
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Tto actually export node content. An 8.x version has begun development:
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| Twig Extensions (twig_extensions) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Text filters, array and date manipulation. (haven't tried this yet) |
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| Restrict Login or Role Access by IP Address (restrict_by_ip) | ✖ | ✖ | |
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Can specify single IP address or ranges. Two modes: restrict login, so they can only login from certain IPs, and restrict role, so they can login from anywhere but only access a role's permissions from the defined IPs. There's a D8 dev branch, last updated June 2016. |
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| Entity Access Audit (entity_access_audit) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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This is a way of visualising - via grids of ticks and crosses - which roles have access to different operations on different entities. |
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| Group (group) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Alternative to the Organic Groups module. Allows you to create groups - e.g. classes, subscriptions, multiple communities. Drupal module of the week post. Blog post. It is by all accounts solidly written, but I found the initial UI confusing (in a "so what do I do now?" way) - you probably need to watch the YouTube video to understand it. |
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| Features (features) | ✔ | ✖ | |
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Not recommended Update: most people are now moving away from features. There is a Configuration Management initiative under discussion in Drupal 8. Package up selected configuration for "features" (e.g. a blog or a photo gallery etc.) for reuse on other sites. Not the same as the new D8 Config sync, which is for exchanging configs between different environments of the same site and requires a cloned DB sharing the same UUIDs. |
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