Do you have a Drupal 7 website or are interested in developing a website using Drupal’s most popular version?
Well then, you’re in luck, because there are loads of Drupal 7 modules and themes available to spice up your website. I have previously written about the most popular Drupal 7 themes. In this article, I’ll be highlighting the most popular modules for Drupal 7.
Like other CMS software, Drupal allows you to extend its functionalities with the help of add-ons. These add-ons are known as “Contributed Modules” or simply Modules. Currently, for Drupal 7, there are 8,124 modules out of which 5,474 are actively updated and maintained. These modules have the ability to introduce all sorts of functionalities from media management to e-Commerce, from core administration to content handling.
A Drupal module is a collection of files containing a few useful and is written in PHP. Since the module code executes inside the context of the website, it can be utilized by all the functions and get to all factors and structures of the Drupal core
As you may know, modules are essential components of this excellent content management system. They add extra functionality to your website and make it as powerful as you wish. So without further ado, let’s start with the list of popular Drupal 7 modules.
While there is a great choice when it comes to putting modules, there are some which are must-haves for a Drupal website. The Drupal 7 core system module provides system-wide defaults for running cron jobs, caching, and other essential tasks. However, before installing any module, you must read the documentation that comes with those modules. A good practice is to make a backup of your Drupal website before installation.
- Chaos Tool Suite
- Token
- Libraries API
- Pathauto
- Entity API
- Jquery Update
- Administration Menu
- Webform
- Date
- IMCE
Chaos Tool Suite
Undoubtedly, the most popular and a very powerful module in the entire sea of modules for Drupal 7, Chaos Tool Suite has more than a whopping 8 million downloads and is currently being used in over 900k websites. These sheer numbers are a perfect testament to its popularity.
This Suite is basically a library of APIs and tools that greatly eases development. Features include the ability to make it easy for modules to let other modules implement plugins from .inc files. To check out the complete list of features of Chaos Tool Suite, head over to its official page.
This module is created by Earl Miles.
Token
In Drupal, Tokens are a special string of text that acts as placeholders. They are used to generate strings dynamically, such as a name in a welcome message. This helps avoid hard-coded strings for dynamic values. Token are used for dynamic properties such as date, time etc.
This module adds tokens that are not available in Drupal 7 by default. To check out the complete list of tokens in Drupal 7, check out the official Drupal documentation here. Do note though that the tokens available on your website will depend on the modules that you have enabled.
This module is contributed by Dave Reid.
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Libraries API
Libraries API allows developers to use external libraries such as Jquery in Drupal websites. As such, it is a very simple yet very powerful module that often plays a vital role in extending Drupal’s development possibilities.
This module is contributed by Daniel Kudwien.
Pathauto
As I mentioned in my Drupal SEO article, clean and understandable URL are essential for your website’s search engine optimization. In this context, it is hard to overlook Pathauto, a very powerful module that automatically creates understandable and clean URLs for various components of your Drupal website such as nodes, taxonomies etc. Note that this module requires Token and Chaos Tools module to be installed on the website.
This module is again, contributed by the venerable Dave Reid.
Entity API
Entity API provides a unified manner of handling entities and their properties by extending Drupal core’s entity API. For in-depth coverage of this module, check out the official page.
This module is contributed by Wolfgang Ziegler.
Jquery Update
Jquery Update pretty much self-explanatory module; it updates the Jquery version in the Drupal core to the latest release of the library. This module comes to us courtesy of Jeff Robins.
Administration Menu
As a Drupal website developer, the Administration menu panel is probably where you spend most of your time. Drupal’s native admin panel is pretty bland and (very) confusing to newcomers. This module aims to address this issue by providing CSS/JS based menu for the admin panel. You can get the complete information for this module on its official page.
Again, Daniel Kudwin is behind this very helpful module.
Webform
If you have ever developed a website, you understand the central importance of the forms. Webform greatly eases the process of creating forms for your website. Not only this, you can also use it to send customized emails upon completion, get the results and import these results into a spreadsheet.
The developer-friendly module is created by Nate Haug.
Date
As you could guess from the name, this module provides a date/time field. In addition, this DATE exposes an API that other modules could use. Note that this module has been included in Drupal 8’s core.
This module was submitted by VijayChandran Mani.
IMCE
IMCE is an AJAX based image and file uploader/ browser. The module is simple but effective and very useful.
We’ve got ufku to thank for this module.
Conclusion
These are the actively maintained Drupal modules. I hope you found this post useful. If you are looking for Drupal 8 modules, then you can check out my post about the must have Drupal 8 modules.
Shahzeb Ahmed
Shahzeb is a Digital Marketer with a Software Engineering background, works as a Community Manager — PHP Community at Cloudways. He is growth ambitious and aims to learn & share information about PHP & Laravel Development through practice and experimentation. He loves to travel and explore new ideas whenever he finds time. Get in touch with him at [email protected]
