9 modules I'm excited to use in upcoming projects
I love "shiny" new things, but I am also cautious and want to ensure I'm using things that are going to work well down the road. Here are a few Drupal projects I've been following and I'm excited about trying them out. Any input is very welcome!
1. Masonry
"Masonry is a dynamic grid layout plugin for jQuery." Pinterest has made this a very popular layout. I'm excited to try out the Views integration of this module. I love the idea of outputting a view in a dynamic grid rather than a list. If you have seen the layout of Pinterest, this is similar.
2. Views infinite scroll
As the name implies, this module creates a pager for Views that allows your browser to load the next page of content as you scroll to the bottom of the page. No more waiting to click for the next ten results.
3. qTip Tooltips
qTip is a nice module to enable easy, stylable tooltips. This module is great to easily add beautiful tooltips to social media links with text like "Follow us on Twitter", etc.
4. Publish Content
I like to give clients access to unpublish their own content, but I prefer not to give permission in Drupal to all the other functions that come with adding that permission to their role. This module allows a more granular permission for just the publish/unpublish function.
5. View Unpublished
When I use the Publish Content module, I will need to allow users access to view unpublished nodes. It looks like this module performs this simple task perfectly.
6. Fences
Fences enables a much cleaner HTML output from Drupal. You can specify the HTML output for each field in your content types. Cleaner, leaner code makes me happy.
7. Link Checker
This is a great module to check your site before going live to ensure all your links are working. When your production URL is different than the development server, it can be very helpful to catch any accidental developmental addresses.
8. Maxlength
This plugin does one small thing and it does it well. I can make a text field countdown how many characters are left for the field. This enhances the usability in the admin interface for my clients.
9. Plupload Widget
I have been searching this year for a usable way to upload multiple files/images to Drupal. I have used various Flickr integrations and I've not been happy with the results. I really like that this module lets you choose all the images you want on a node and upload all of them at once using the open source Plupload library.
What do you think?
Do you have any challenges or successes with these modules? I would love to discuss them. Or, are there modules you want to try out?
Further Drupal module reading:
Photo by David Villarreal Fernández
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Plupload is great. It's something that was sorely needed in Drupal. I've used it on multiple projects recently with little to no issues.
@mike: Good to hear! Are you using Plupload with the Plup module or the Plupload Media integration or some other?
I've primarily used the "Plupload Integration" module:
http://drupal.org/project/plupload
Instead of publishcontent and view_unpublished, consider instead using a module that supports revisions. If you just use the "publish" bit, you need to take a page offline to make moderated changes. With either http://drupal.org/project/revisioning (simpler) or http://drupal.org/project/workbench (full permissions / workflow), you will be able to keep the current approved version of the page online while the latest changes are in moderation.
I'm using Plupload with the Media 2.x module and http://drupal.org/sandbox/pp/1244926 (Plupload connector).
1 word: Awesome!
(ok, 1 word and a questionmark ;-) )
We are building an intranet for a client right now using the wookmark module with views to get the jmasonry pintrest style grid, doesn't seem to play well with infinite scroll though...
@Mike: The Plupload integration module on D7 is only an API :( I wish I could do that. Have you tried any that make it work on D7?
@Greg.1.anderson: Good clarification. Typically, I train clients to use "unpublish" in situations where they want to delete something that has been online. It is so much easier to get something back from unpublish rather than from deleted :)
Also, we do like Wordbench as well! We use it for larger sites where there are multiple editors. I tend to shy away from it personally when it is a smaller site with only one or two editors.
@Rob C: I'm always a little terrified to use a sandbox module :D Do you find it to be stable and work ok?
@Crispin Read: I am trying out inifinite scroll right now and I'm having the same issue. I need to scour the issue queue for fixes. Let me know if you find the fix and I'll share if I do.
@JD Collier
It's stable for now, but will require some work in the future. Media 2.x is going to change a lot.
I understand people don't really trust sandboxes, but i know a lot of sandboxes that actually work just fine, but i can't guarantee anything obviously.
Thanks for the heads-up on Masonry. Looks absolutely delicious. Can't wait to try it out.