Our Go-to Modules for Building Drupal 7 Websites

As a Drupal Site Builder at 4Site, Drupal allows me to create a dynamic and scalable site without any programming. If you want to add functionality to your Drupal site there is usually a module that can do it.

Drupal has been our go-to CMS for building client websites since 2007. The modules we use for building a client’s site have changed since then, as Drupal 7 has evolved over the past few years. We have since built our own distribution of Drupal called 4Site Hub,  used for building nonprofit websites, that comes prepackaged with all of our favorite Drupal 7 modules.

Here is a list of some of the modules we have packaged into 4Site Hub and have found to be a necessity when building any Drupal 7 website:

• Email: Makes it easy to  to add an email address field to add to content types for admin to enter emails

• Entity Reference: Provides a field that can reference other entities, such as pieces of content, users, etc.

  • This comes in handy when you want to add a related content region to a page

• Link: Defines simple link field type with a corresponding title that can be used for calls-to-action

• External Links: Opens links to external sites within your content in new browser tabs

• Webform: Enables the creation of forms and questionnaires on your website; also offers customizable autoresponders

• Delta: Gives you the ability to create alternative layouts for content, via the Context module (Note: You must use the Omega base theme in order for this to work)

• Context: Context allows you to manage contextual conditions and reactions for different portions of your site.

• Menu Breadcrumb: This module allows you to use the menu the current page belongs to for the breadcrumb

• Custom Breadcrumb: Many new features have been added including support for Views, Panels, Taxonomy vocabularies and terms, paths, and a simple API that allows contributed modules to enable custom breadcrumbs for module pages and theme templates

• FullCalendar: Provides a views style plugin for FullCalendar and has add-ons to use colors to differentiate taxonomy, content types and more

• Date: Makes date/time fields available on content types

• Geofield: Stores geographic and location data (points, lines, and polygons).

• Geocode: Geocode turns data into longitude and latitude and allows the link of Addressfield with Geofield.

• OpenLayers: Stores map configurations: maps, styles, layers, and behaviors, and combines them to create maps using the OpenLayers JavaScript library on any Drupal site

• Address Field: Address Field defines a new field type to store international postal addresses, implementing a subset of the address elements defined in the xNAL standard.

• Views: The foundation of almost any Drupal website, it allows you to create customized displays of content, such as lists, grids, slideshows and more

• Nodequeue: Create queues which can be used to  to control the order of the display of a view

• Media: Provides the core API for displaying different types of rich media on your Drupal website which is stored on your server or using various internet services

• Media: Vimeo: Provides Vimeo support to the Media module

• Media: YouTube: Provides YouTube support to the Media module

• Menu Block: Provides configurable blocks of menu items

• Nice Menus: CSS/jQuery drop-down, drop-right and drop-left menus to be placed in blocks

• AddThis: Creates an AddThis share button as a block, to be used in themes and to added to nodes

• CSS3PIE: Provides CSS3PIE (http://css3pie.com/) library integration for cross browswer CSS3 support

• Lightbox2: Enables Lightbox2 overlays in Drupal

• Global Redirect: Searches for an alias of the current URL and 301 redirects if found; prevents content from being accessible from multiple URL’s

• reCAPTCHA: Uses the reCAPTCHA web service to provide a more user-friendly CAPTCHA system for online forms

• Google Analytics: Allows your site to be tracked by Google Analytics by adding a Javascript tracking code to every page

• XML sitemap: Creates an XML sitemap conforming to the sitemaps.org protocol

• Site map: Provides a site map that gives visitors an overview of your site; It can also display the RSS feeds for all blogs and categories

What are some of your go-to Drupal 7 modules?

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