Useful Drupal modules

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"Essential"

Creates a field with a serial number, so you can have the equivalent of a MySQL AUTO_INCREMENT field for a content type (if nodes are deleted the old serial number is not reused).

Although this only has a dev branch which hasn't had updates since April 2016, it does work in D8.

There's no direct migration path previous versions, but people have written their own migrations.

Check issue queue for patches - including:

• Support migrating existing values
• Removing deprecated entitymanager
• Serial module field tables not created during config synchronization
• Type not found for custom Entity

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An implementation of  OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework RFC - based on a PHP League package.

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"Essential"

Send mail to a remote SMTP server (e.g. a transactional email provider like Postmark).  

You should put your authentication details in settings.php, rather than files you commit to the repo, for security.  

To get this to work - it was sending tests but nothing else - it seemed I needed to switch to a commit on the dev branch:

"drupal/smtp": "dev-1.x#3d354b3911409c9b11716bf2104498fb431eea72"

(note to self: see SM notes) 
 

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Snippets are Twig templates that can be managed using the UI.  They can be inserted in various ways including via CKEditor, tokens.

Support for HTML, CSS, JS, and variables.

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"Essential"

Scans email addresses/usernames/IP addresses against the stopforumspam.com database and then blocks or deletes the accounts.
You can set the threshold - i.e. how many times an email address needs to be listed in the spam database before action is taken.
You can also have it scan your entire existing database, not just new users. (It does this via a configurable cron run.)

Tested with D7.

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"Essential"

Replace text on the site.

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"Essential"

Lets you synchronise taxonomies, custom blocks and menus.  

Important: always double check after importing if menu / block etc. has been correctly updated - if not, you may need to use a more forceful option.

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Add extra tables JS support for views (and many other pages) - e.g. search box, dynamic column sorting, rearranging columns, exporting to clipboard etc.

If you get "TypeError: tables.DataTable is not a function" when using datatables module, first, try going to /admin/config/content/table_trash/global_settings and saving the existing settings.

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Provides a block with a tag cloud of chosen taxonomy term. Works but a bit buggy, e.g. UI taxonomy setting reverts to 'tags'.  Requires clearing the cache to update (including changing any settings).  Choice of numbers after each tag to indicate quality, or 'wordcloud' style with varying sizes (will need you to modify your CSS to add some spacing between words). 

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Telephone number field type.  This is in core, but you need to enable it.

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"Essential"

Adds a user interface for browsing tokens (the tags you can insert into various fields).

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"Essential"

Add extra menus (which appear as cog icons with a title, which you can click and expand) to the admin toolbar at the top of your site.

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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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Text filters, array and date manipulation.

(haven't tried this yet)

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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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"Essential"

Much faster than using kint, with colour coding, and still works nicely within narrow DOM elements.
Make sure you install using composer, as it has symfony dependencies.

Enabling twig debugging in the first place:

Also make sure you've activated twig debugging properly (including enabling the settings.local.php file in settings.php, and adding the debug setting to development.services.yml)
Potential gotcha - settings.local.php needs to be in /sites/default (or whichever), not just /sites/
If Twig debugging isn't enabled, the symptom is you don't see any output for the dump() commands.

Usage Tip:

- Hover over the keys and you get a tooltip that says 'Public method','Protected property' etc.

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Use Xdebug breakpoints in Twig templates - {{ breakpoint() }}

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"Essential"

install tfa and ga_login (TFA is just a framework, it doesn't come with it's own login plugins.)

Use this patch I wrote - it adds display of validation skip times and an admin reset button for users who are got locked out.

My installation instructions:

Next you need to generate an encryption profile.
First you need to generate a key - key type needs to be Encryption (not Authentication).
A 128bit key = 128/8 bytes = 16 characters - so generate a random 16 character string.

Set key provider to File rather than Configuration, this means the key won't end up in your version control.

Tick the 'strip trailing line breaks' box to avoid the "The selected key size does not match the actual size of the key." error

Key path should be relative to Drupal so the config will work on multiple sites
e.g. if you have created a file called /app/tfa.key on a lando container, set the key path to ../tfa.key
I'm actually creating mine in a keys directory.

Remember to save the key somewhere in your password manager, or your ansible variables, in case you lose the files later.
Remember to add /keys to your .gitignore file, so it won't get stored in version control.
Remember to copy it manually onto your production server.

In the TFA settings (/admin/config/people/tfa) you probably want to increase the number of times a user can skip validation.

Note that TFA has a separate 'Tfa user login' block (replacing the ordinary 'User login') 

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"Essential"

Gives you a checkbox for 'Unique' when editing fields - can have it checked during form entry (via AJAX) and specify a custom error message per field.  Seems to have bug where field you're checking is sometimes refocused (even if no errors) if you've already tabbed away from it and continued typing.

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"Essential"

Very useful module for scanning installed modules (including your own custom code) for compatibility issues - gives a detailed report of necessary fixes.

NB: scanning using the UI (rather than Drush) won't work on a dev server without a valid SSL certificate.

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"Essential"

Block registrations (wildcards on email address and username)

Useful if you're getting persistent spam registrations from certain domains.

Tested with D7.  This used to be in core in D6.​​​​​​​

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This gives you a single box where you can enter tokens to form the default username.

It seems to work, but in D7 the patterns section ("Only use the below pattern elements") was empty. This is supposedly because there's a dependency on the 'profile' module, except profile doesn't exist in D7 (I tried profile2 instead but it made no difference) and profile2 doesn't exist in D8.

auto_username displays tokens OK and is more powerful / has more settings including customise at what point names are truncated, etc.

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Not recommended

Migrate views from D7 to D8.
Once installed on D7 - you need to go to /admin/config/view-migration 
It outputs multiple YML files and you're specifying a directory to put them in, which you need to create first.

My experience of the YAML output has been:

- incomplete (e.g. multiple missing displays in a complex view, views without a machine name)
- invalid UTF8 due to the next and previous arrows in pager.options.tags being encoded wrong
- the dependencies section at the top of the file not being set out correctly

It doesn't look like there's much current development activity (likewise migrate_views, which is the other plugin people usually mention).

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Provides extra options for aggregating data in tables - e.g. grouping sets of rows together and summing the values of particular fields.

Has a hook - hook_views_aggregation_functions_info() - which lets you add your own options to the table aggregation settings - e.g.  supposing you have a limit for something (number of tickets, nights of accommodation) and want to decrement it - you can write a method to sum the matching rows and then do a calculation on the total.

Also supports 'add column function' - adds a grand total (or other summary field) at the very bottom of the table.

Caution - this module breaks hook_views_pre_render() - you can write your own pre_render method to remove or shuffle entire rows, but any chances to values will be overwritten (discovered this by looking through the source and looking for the use of that hook).  The workaround is to try and do what you need to by using hook_views_aggregation_functions_info() instead.

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"Essential"

By default if you add multiple contextual filters to a view, they must all pass (AND).
This gives you a checkbox in Advanced > Query Settings for the view which switches it to OR.

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Not recommended

Layouts for exposed filters - i.e. you can move each filter into a region (supports Panels and Display Suite).

When I tried this (Summer 2018) the D8 branch wasn't really there yet - you could only rearrange the basic filter components in D8 (like search term, submit button, reset button), not all the extra ones you've added.   I went with using CSS (e.g. clear: both) instead.

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• supports both a 'Load more' button and automated load
• need to turn AJAX on for the view
• patch needed to support back button (adds a preserve history option to settings, which then needs to be turned on)

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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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"Essential"

For Views that use Table format. Adds a row underneath each record - you change the format from 'table' to the 'secondary row' option, you get an extra select dropdown in the table *settings*, and you can also specify colspan.  This does mean the label will be missing by default (you won't have a column header any more) - so you need to edit the field and tick rewrite output, and then specify your desired label, followed by the field value in Twig.
 

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Allows you to use /my-view/foo instead of /my-view/123 when adding a contextual filter based on taxonomy terms

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A fork of the System Status module, but with a Symfony app for you to install to act as a server, rather than using a paid third-party service.  Monitor core/module update status of multiple Drupal sites.  If you're familiar with Nagios and NRPE, it's a little bit like that, but for Drupal modules, and more lightweight.  Note the server uses MongoDB, so you need to install that, plus the PHP extension, and it communicates with a public key-pair, though it should set that up itself.  

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"Essential"

Install the devel module first.  The profile is a toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Features:

• useful shortcuts (e.g. clear cache)
• view info about current user, their role and permissions
• server HTTP response
• cache, DB and DOM loading performance
• memory use
• which blocks and views have been loaded

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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"Essential"

One of the best maintained contrib modules.  Main benefits: nicely presented forms with powerful conditional logic, YAML configuration, flexible user permissions, very clean data storage, secure.  Codebase is also very much written "the Drupal way".

I'm currently using this patch to avoid AJAX errors - it's only necessary where you've both enabled Automatically save as draft when paging, previewing, and when there are validation errors, and are using a confirmation type like inline, that still uses AJAX to submit the form when there are no validation errors.

Troubleshooting install of webform external libraries: (Jan 2020)

Follow these instructions: https://www.drupal.org/node/3003140

If you get a composer SSL error, follow these instructions.

(specifically, you need to set openssl.cafile in php.ini)

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"Essential"

This module lets you add fields from submissions to view, and sort/filter the view on them, in the same way you would standard fields from the Field API.

It's still alpha and not as polished/robust as the webform module itself - but it's certainly OK to use in production provided you test things first - check every combination of exposed filters works, and double check you aren't seeing duplicate rows (right now I've locked it to a recent commit on the dev-5.x branch, which doesn't need any patches).