The Venture Skills Blog

We use Drupal for our clients CMS (content management system) while Drupal is extremely powerful it is also extendible via its modules which provide additional properties, here at Venture Skills we don’t just use vanilla Drupal installs but a mixture of home grown and publicly available modules with the second beta release of Drupal 5.0 I thought it would be worth looking at some of the modules we use and why remember these modules are for our clients use primarily to make their life easier:

1. Autosave – This new module saves post/pages during the editing stages in the same way as WordPress, this module is great for clients who may loose connections etc. it uses AJAX to save the page in real time the only downside is installation isn’t quite as simple as normal requiring the downloading of an additional Javascript file.
2. Custom Breadcrumb – Some times Drupal default breadcrumb trail is not right, or to restricting the custom breadcrumb module allows you to specify your own path and includes a set of place holders based around users and dates.
3. Autologout – Perhaps not the most obvious choice but Auto logout does prevent users from being permanently logged in this is particularly important as most clients are assigned privileges to do minor administration and create content. This tool is designed to log out users who are inactive for specific periods of time, check out IBM tutorial on how they modified this module.
4. Custom Links – Allow the placement of links at the end of nodes or teasers, this simple addition can make navigation so simple, like the custom breadcrumb place holders can be used for date and author information, and links can be restricted to specific nodes and or content types.
5. Front Page – Fantastic module allowing complete customisation of the front page of your site based on role level, this means, new users, old users, users who haven’t visited in a while and unauthenticated users can all have their own front page.

Honourable mentions include:

• Masquerade – Simple tool to allow admins to login in temporarily as a user
• Views – A great tool, and building block for many modules (pun intended)
• WidgEditor – A WYSIWYG Editor

All the above are for Druapl 5.0 what modules do you use?

Other Articles on the Venture Skills Network about Drupal

HReview a CCK example using contemplate
The Digg Effect and can Drupal survive it?
Want to Create a Digg like site with no programming?

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