Want to get Lullabot article, videocast, and podcast announcements delivered right to your in-box? Let us know your email address (we won't share it) and we'll let you know when anything exciting happens.

Subscribe to our bi-weekly audio podcast - The Lullabot Drupal Podcast, our daily interview snippets - Drupal Voices, our periodic videocasts, or everything. Just choose your favorite podcast-listening application or service and click away!


Lullabot Podcast 80: Top 40 Drupal Modules Revisited

Team Lullabot
November 9, 2009
  • Artist: Lullabot
  • Title: Lullabot Podcast 80: Top 40 Drupal Modules Revisited
  • Album: Drupal Podcast
  • Year: 2009
  • Length: 117:27 minutes (46.25 MB)
  • Format: Mono 44kHz 55Kbps (VBR)

Angie Byron, Jeff Eaton, Nate Haug, Kent Bye, and Jeff Robbins discuss the latest Drupal news and then revisit the Drupal Top 40 podcast, this time with a list of 50+ "must have" Drupal modules. Enjoy this epic 2 hour podcast!

The List

  1. Views
  2. Pathauto
  3. Admin Menu
  4. Devel / Theme Developer
  5. Schema
  6. WYSIWYG (was TinyMCE) or BUEditor
  7. Organic Groups
  8. Panels and Chaos Tools
  9. i18n
  10. Ubercart
  11. Flag
  12. Calendar and Date
  13. Drush
  14. Content Templates
  15. FiveStar / Voting API
  16. Mollom
  17. Diff
  18. Content Profile
  19. Backup and Migrate
  20. Embedded Media Field
  21. Filefield Sources
  22. Custom Links
  23. FeedAPI (soon to be 'Feeds')
  24. Services
  25. Views Attach
  26. Insert
  27. Automatic Nodetitles
  28. Views Slideshow
  29. SWF Tools
  30. Global redirect
  31. Data module
  32. Table Wizard/Migrate
  33. Scheduler
  34. Workflow
  35. CAPTCHA (or ReCaptcha)
  36. Login Toboggan
  37. Facebook Connect
  38. Comment Notify
  39. Content Access (or Private)
  40. NodeQueue
  41. Views Bulk Operations
  42. Better Formats
  43. Webform
  44. Google Analytics
  45. String Overrides
  46. Memcache
  47. Node reference url widget
  48. Node Clone
  49. Node Export
  50. Read more Link

In core for Drupal 7

  1. CCK
  2. FileField
  3. ImageCache
  4. Image Field
  5. Poormanscron
  6. Admin Role
  7. Vertical Tabs
  8. Token

Comments on this post will automatically be closed three months from the original post date.

Comments

Nodequeue Drag + Drop

On November 9th, 2009 Ezra (not verified) said:

Thanks for the great podcast and for highlighting Nodequeue! You mentioned that Nodequeue lacks a drag & drop interface, but users who have used it in the past few months know that it's had drag & drop for several releases now in the 6.x branch. Seems like it's about time for me to update the screenshot on the project page ;)!

What about Rules? Activity?

On November 9th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) said:

What about Rules? Activity? Advanced Forum? User Relationships/Flag Friend? It seems like this list is oriented towards a specific kind of website.

views size

On November 9th, 2009 Pasqualle (not verified) said:

views is slightly larger than Drupal core

no, it is not
php+js+css (+robots.txt +html help)
drupal-6.x-dev = 2.9 MB
views-6.x-2.x-dev = 1,3 MB

The images for advanced help and the module translations makes the views package larger than the Drupal 6 package..

and for Drupal 7 this argument is really week as the codebase for
drupal-7.x-dev = 6.9 MB

Would you build a Drupal site without views?

watcher

On November 10th, 2009 hansrossel (not verified) said:

Watcher module is a nice alterternative for comment_notify, http://groups.drupal.org/node/15928

Great stuff

On November 10th, 2009 RopaOlle (not verified) said:

Thanks for an entertaining and inspiring podcast, now I just have to build a Drupal site, so I can test all these lovely modules.

Draggable Views Much Easier to Use than Node Queue

On November 10th, 2009 Shai Gluskin (not verified) said:

On the issue of Nodequeue... if your need is for non-techie content managers to arbitrarily order nodes in a list, the Draggable Views is easier to use than Nodequeue. It takes D6 drag-and-drop and allows you to add a drag-and-drop field to any view.

My regular use-case is to add an admin display designed for content editors to an existing view, and then restrict that view to the content editors.

With Node Queue you have to use Views "Relationships" to get it working, and also not forget to "sort" on the queue as well. In addition, you have to expose your content editors to the "Queue" - "Sub-queue" UI from NodeQueue which is confusing.

(I did not have anything to do with creating or maintaining Draggable Views... though I wish I did ;->).

Thanks for the great podcast!

let me second that, i found

On November 12th, 2009 dasjo (not verified) said:

let me second that, i found draggable views being really util to letting my users organize lists

I use draggable views too.

On December 21st, 2009 Korey (not verified) said:

I use draggable views too. Works great. Was using nodequeue previously.

Facebook chat

On November 11th, 2009 mattm (not verified) said:

who was getting facebook chat messages throughout the episode!?!

List of Moduals

On November 11th, 2009 Thanecast (not verified) said:

# Drupal moduals
50 Read More Link
49 Node Export
48 Node Clone
47 Node Reference URL Widget
46 Mem Cache
45 String Over rides
44 Google Analitics
43 Web Form
42 Better Formats
41 Views Bulk Operations
40 Node Cue
39 Content Access
38 Comment Notify
37 Facebook Connect
36 Login Tobogin
35 Captcha & reCaptcha
34 Work Flow
33 scheduler
32 Table Wizard & Migrate
31 Data
30 Global Redirect
29 Swift Tools
28 Views Slideshow
27 Automatic Node Titles
26 Insert
25 Views Attach
24 Services
23 Feed API
22 Cuctomer Links, Custom Pagers, Custom Breadcrumbs
21 Filefield Sources
20 Embedded Media Field
19 Backup and Migrate
18 Content Profile
17 Diff
16 Molum
15 Five Star
14 Contect Template
13 Drush (Ager)
12 Calendar & Date
11 Flag
10 Ubercart
9 I18N
8 Panels (Chaos Tools or "C-Tools")
7 Organic Groups
6 WYSIWYG
5 Schema
4 Devel
3 Admin Menu
2 Path Auto
1 Views

Disagree on Assessment as to Why Drupal isn't in Core

On November 12th, 2009 Shai Gluskin (not verified) said:

Okay... I made it to the end. You guys must have been really burnt by then. Great job.

I thought the discussion on why Views isn't in core was off spot (I just made that up; it's the opposite of "spot on") ;-).

How does @eaton know that Views is installed on only 60% of Drupal sites? I presume he is getting that data from usage stats from drupal.org. Those stats are better than nothing, but they are really, really blunt. How many of the 200K sites phoning home to d.o. are really being used? We have no idea. With D6, unless you opt-out, Drupal phones home. It will even phone home from a local install. People are lazy. I'm sure thousands if not tens of thousands of those sites (without Views installed) were test/evaluation/play-around installs that were never uninstalled.

Eaton mentions the size of Views. From an FTP point-of-view, the difference is negligible in terms of upload time. And as for performance hit; if Views were in core, a bunch of other code could be taken out such as Tracker module, blog module, and likely more.

I think that the the more likely reason Views isn't in core is because Views is under really active development and when you move something into core, development slows down. In addition, Earl Miles (@merlinofchaos) has brought a huge amount of creativity to the Views endeavor and there is a lot of working-by-committee that is involved in getting something in to core that would squelch that creativity.

Anyway, here is the main discussion on moving Views into core.

It will eventually happen. If not by D8, then certainly by D9.

I meant, "Why Views isn't in core"

On November 12th, 2009 Shai Gluskin (not verified) said:

Hmm, I wonder what the deep meaning of that slip could be? :)

Great job guys

On November 13th, 2009 Martin Baker (not verified) said:

I listened to the previous one before I started on Drupal and it was great to hear an updated list now I know what the hell you're talking about! Definitely picked up a few useful modules I hadn't heard of.

Outstanding

On November 14th, 2009 toomanypets (not verified) said:

Thank you all very much for the effort. This was excellent. I actually listened to the whole thing twice -- I know, I need to get a life.

Two modules I just love that

On November 22nd, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) said:

Two modules I just love that are not on the list are Rules & Module Filter.

Podcast on Drupal Distributions/Installation Profiles

On November 25th, 2009 Natasha Cole (not verified) said:

Hi Team Lullabot,

Thank you so much for great work & entertainment (yes, you are entertaining :) too! )
with podcast, articles, Dvds, modules & everything else.

Could you guys please have a podcast on Drupal Distributions/Installation Profiles. please.. please.. please... Discussing needs, problems, possible issues, benefits, pro & cons to standard drupal, business opportunities like support solutions, legal issues (if they are re-branded) would be great!

We believe & have surveyed that there is a big need for more work in this area of delivering better version of Drupal - OUT OF THE BOX! "that kind of culture shift would be awesome!"

Looking forward to the podcast!

Best Regards,
Natasha Cole,
Drupalpoint.com - Drupal Specialists.

Yup, I also confess I listen

On November 26th, 2009 Jugney (not verified) said:

Yup, I also confess I listen to these podcasts for fun - as I'm driving in my car. I especially enjoy Jeff's sense of humor. This is overall great stuff. Thanks.

Drupal Distributions

On December 1st, 2009 James (not verified) said:

Natasha, a promising post on Drupal.org today regarding Drupal Distributions: http://drupal.org/node/647374

By the way...

On November 26th, 2009 Jugney (not verified) said:

Drupal Distributions was podcast 75.

is panel that usefull when

On December 2nd, 2009 panel (not verified) said:

is panel that usefull when you can do complex layout with a 960grid for example?

Podcast short

On December 11th, 2009 frazras (not verified) said:

This podcast is only 29:16 in the player, maybe a bug or a site limitation

Thanks & nice job

On January 1st, 2010 Paul (not verified) said:

Really enjoyed this podcast but damn that's a long time to pay attention, maybe it would be better to cut something like this into three to make it easier follow
thanks again nice job

Great List of Super Modules

On January 9th, 2010 Shaun (not verified) said:

I don't have time to listen to the podcast, but thanks for posting this awesome list. There are so many modules to wade through when implementing a new feature on a Drupal site and there's no easy way to weed out the dead projects. This list contains almost everything I need except for AJAX comments.

SWF Tools and getID3

On January 30th, 2010 Stuart (not verified) said:

Thanks for rating SWF Tools in your top 40! I develop it as a hobby, so it's great to see it's appreciated. In the podcast you ask about getID3 integration. It doesn't have it... yet. But the next release should have it along with some new playlisting features that will be able to pull in stuff, along with some new theming. At least that's the idea. Anyhow, thanks again for rating SWF Tools!