25 Drupal Modules To Simplify Drupal Development

The beauty of Drupal lies in being an open-source platform where a community of developers can contribute now and then. With each new version of Drupal, many new modules are introduced for the developers that can help them improve their Drupal development ventures.

Drupal boasts more than 42,650 modules. This is the place where Drupal clearly distinguished itself from other content management systems. Drupal modules are a big reason for the community’s popularity. So, practically, you cannot master Drupal development without modules! And that is the reason why some modules like Chaos installed downloaded more than 11 million times.

In this blog post, we’ll cover a few of the most popular Drupal modules every developer should be aware of. But before we get our hands dirty, let’s discuss the basics of Drupal modules.

Technically speaking, Drupal modules are nothing but a collection of files containing some functionality written in PHP. Since the Drupal module's code executes within the file's context, you can use all the functions and access all variables or structures in the Drupal core with the Drupal core. It is the heart of Drupal development, which helps organizations achieve advanced features in their website.

But, with so many modules to choose from, it becomes a little tricky for the Drupal development services providers to choose the best one for their Drupal projects. We’ve rounded up the top modules every developer or Drupal development company should be aware of to simplify things for you.

It is one of the most popular and most downloaded Drupal modules. With more than nine hundred thousand sites using it, it is the most installed Drupal module. This module is designed to ease the work of Drupal developers. It improves the developer experience. It consists of various tools such as Plugins, Exportables, AJAX responder, Contexts, Page Manager, etc.

With more than seventy thousand downloads per week, this module is our second-best pick for you. If you want to show or hide any specific field based on the value of another field, you should go for conditional fields. It allows you to manage a set of dependencies between different fields. So, if you are editing a specific node, these dependent fields can be modified dynamically with the help of State API.

As per the statistics on the module page, more than 35% of Drupal 8 websites use the Paragraphs module. The module is designed for content authors and editors. It provides a module framework to create content during your Drupal development. With the help of Site Builders, you can give more power to your end-users. You can define different Paragraph Types and can use them as and when required. Whether it is about adding images, videos, slideshows, or anything else, you can do it on the fly with this module.

With more than two hundred thousand websites using this module, it is a great module for admins to save their time. The ultimate goal of the Admin Toolbar module is to improve the default toolbar by converting it into a drop-down menu. This makes it easy for the administrators to access different pages quickly. Since it works over and above the default toolbar, it is lighter and helps Drupal development services providers to save their time managing the admin panel.

It holds the first place when it comes to analytics for a Drupal website. It helps Drupal development services providers to track web statistics for their websites. Starting from single or multiple domain tracking, links, files downloaded, and site searches to Drupal messages tracking, you can do everything on the go. All you have to do is copy a tracking code and paste the JavaScript snippet into the respective pages of your Drupal site.

It is the next recommendation when you’re using Drupal 8 for your website. It is one of the most essential Drupal modules that you can never afford to ignore. Every website needs a form and the Webform module helps you build any type of form to collect any kind of data. You can easily customize the behavior and different aspects of your forms and inputs. Whether you are looking for a multi-page form or a simple contact form, you can create it on the go with the Webform module for your Drupal development.

It is a modern quavering language that helps you get rid of conventional REST to communicate with APIs. The GraphQL modules enable you to inject data into Twig templates with the help of GraphQL queries. Moreover, you don’t need any site-building or pre-processing. This module is faster and provides only the results you are looking for, and that too without worrying about unwanted stuff from REST API calls. You can also expose Drupal entities to other GraphQL client applications.

Designed to simplify the life of the content editor, this module provides a widget for inline management of referenced entities with ease. It is useful for the use case where you have a parent->child relationship and child entities are never managed outside the parent form. With the inline entity form module, you can easily create the main product and add any other product variations from the same page. Moreover, you can even reference existing entities within your Drupal site.

Related Article: Drupal 9 Complete Guide: Hot Cake in Drupal Development

Whether you are associated with Drupal module development or a site admin, the Drupal Devel module is extensively used to create content for nodes, comments, users, and other content types or entities. It helps developers to debug problems related to node access on the go. It also provides an insight into some meaningful analytics such as database queries, caching abilities, resource utilization, and a lot more. Moreover, you can even add a footer to all the pages of your Drupal site with the help of other modules like Webprofiler.

Looking for ways to sync your production files on a local or development server? Stage File Proxy module can help you do it. It is a general solution designed for developers willing to get the production files on a development server as and when required. It enables you to save the time and disk space you need to request your development environment's file directory to the production and generate a copy of the production file in your development environment. It updates the database without any need to update your file directory.

As its name suggests, this module helps you integrate the popular mail delivery service Mailchimp to your website. With this module, you can create sign-up forms, get in touch with your Mailchimp audience, or even insert Drupal content within a campaign. Moreover, you can also integrate the Mailchimp Events API to track user interactions with Webforms in Mailchimp.

You guessed it right! This module helps you group up your content and users on your site. You can create arbitrary collections of users and content on your site and define permissions on it. Ideally, Drupal allows the user to view, create or edit the different content types created by you. But with this module, you can restrict them from viewing or editing all content types within your Drupal site.

What if you wish to conduct some survey or capture votes on your Drupal site? Well, Poll modules help you do it on the go. It enables you to create and manage polls on your site. The module is fully multilingual and translates polls. It helps you create your blocks and pages. Moreover, you can integrate it with render caching and BigPipe.

Take control over how your content is displayed using a drag and drop interface. Display Suite is a handy tool for the Drupal development company or developer to build page layouts. You can arrange your notes, comments, views, or user data the way you want without worrying about managing different template files. All you have to do is drag and drop a predefined list of layouts to change the display of your Drupal site.

This module helps you automatically generate path aliases for a different type of content, including nodes, users, and taxonomy terms, without any manual intervention. The user is not required to provide any path alias since it will be taken care of by Pathauto for your Drupal development venture. With this module, you can organize your content into manageable sections by URL.

Do you want additional tokens, which are not supported by core? The token is one of the most known Drupal modules for providing an API that allows other modules to get into variable bits of text. It even brings a UI for browsing tokens.

When you get into Drupal development, there are many content entities you have to manage. However, many categories or contents don’t need to be visible to the end-users. Of course, Drupal automatically creates a URL for all such entities. But there are chances that your site may contain incomplete-looking pages. Rabbit Hole helps you create redirects that restrict access to such content. This, in the end, enables you to make your site much cleaner.

When you get into Drupal development, there are very few items that you wish to show to improve the page load time. You can either choose to render pagination where the user needs to navigate from one page to another or go for the Views Infinite Scroll module of Drupal. It allows you to load and display pages of any view inline with the help of AJAX. In this case, the pager will be triggered with the press of a button or dynamically as and when the user scrolls to the bottom of the content.

If you wish to provide a custom Formatter for the taxonomy items, you can go for the Taxonomy Formatter module from Drupal. The module will add a new Formatter that will enable you to specify the element type, the wrapper type, classes, separator, and whether they link to term pages or not. This brings a lot more powerful and flexible, customizable layout options for your Drupal site.

Anything you post on your site is available for anyone else to copy and save or reuse. If you wish to protect your content and restrict copying, Copy Prevention is the module you will need. Using this module, you can disable text selection, copy to clipboard, right-click on all site content and images, put a transparent image above all images, and hide your images from the search engines. However, using all of these methods may make your site less user-friendly.

If you wish to improvise images on your site with special effects, you can go for the Image Effects module. The module provides you with a suite of additional effects that you can add to the images on your site. You can overlay images with other images or change the blur or sharpness settings of any image. It also supports the GD toolkit from Drupal Core and the ImageMagick toolkit.

When it comes to enhancing the security of your website, Autoban could be the ideal choice. It allows automating IP ban with the help of the watchdog table defined in the module rules. It comes up with two variations, Autoban Core Ban and Autoban Advanced Ban. With the help of Ban Provider, the rules module identifies the IP and performs the IP ban. You can even define IP range in Autoban Advanced Ban.

The ultimate goal of this module is to provide a generic entity browser/selector/selector for the Drupal entity. You can use it the way you want to select a few entities and do something with them or embed entities into WYSIWYG. You can even use it as a powerful entity reference widget.

One of the most responsive menu modules that helps you enable mobile off-screen menu on the go. It is one of the most popular Drupal 8 menu modules that brings many cost benefits to your Drupal development. It is pretty easy to use and brings a whole host of features for the developers. Whether you wish to combine two different menus or want powerful touchscreen support using hammer.js and superfish, you can do everything with ease. However, you may have to spend some money to leverage this module.

Sorting nodes based on the publication date or titles is relatively easy. But what if you want to custom sort nodes on your website? Well, the DraggableViews module empowers you with an option to create custom views where you can drag and drop sorting of your choice. Set different orders, order any entity, and use tabledrag.js or jQuery UI draggable javascript to define the order.

So, there it is! An exhaustive list of Drupal modules you must know to design a fantastic website. Your website deserves impressive features. It is not possible to find a module for your custom needs. And thus, you can always leverage custom Drupal module development from professionals like us. Whether it is about modifying your existing Drupal modules or creating a whole new module from scratch, we’re experts in designing modules the way you want. Let’s get in touch with us and discuss your module requirements now!