Top Drupal Modules List

Drupal has an extensive list of useful modules that can even convert your site from a blog to a full-fledged social networking site to a forum. This post will give you the idea of some of the most essential Drupal modules that you can use to make a blog with the following functionality:

• A rich text editor
• Menu block
• SEO friendly page title
• Sitemap
• Social media sharing option
• Ads placement inside your contents
• Showing similar contents
• Tag clouds
• Search module
• Featured contents
• Disqus Comment box

Rich text editor

1. CKE editor
2. IMCE image editor

CKEditor is one of the best and clean editors to use for creating your contents. You can format your contents with the ease and functionality of Microsoft Word. But this module is not that impressive to upload image in your posts. That is why you need to integrate an image uploading module called IMCE with this editor. The details of this editor upload can be found at my post about CKEditor..

SEO modules

1. Boost
2. Page Title
3. XML site map
4. SEO checklist

Boost is for making your site loading faster in order to improve user experience and to give you site some SEO advantages. With this module you can set the minimum and maximum caching time of HTML, XML, and AJAX.

Page Title module helps to set the way you want your page title to appear in the Search Engines. It can help you to avoid the problem of duplicate title tags problem and can give you the opportunity to show you blog title appear with your post title exactly the way you want it to show up.

XML sitemap: this is one of the easiest ways to enhance your blog’s search ranking. You just have to upload it and then enable it. The following option of this module you can enable to get the best out of it.

1. XML sitemap custom
2. XML sitemap engines
3. XML sitemap node
4. XML sitemap taxonomy

For further information you can read Drupal SEO checklist.

Social networking Features

1. Sharethis module
2. Facebook like button

Sharethis module helps to add share button of social media sites either at the beginning or at the end of your post. You can even add it in your sidebars. Another useful module is Facebook like button which has innate capacity to bring traffic to your blog.

Ads injector

If you are interested to monetized you blog, then the module “content injector” is all you need because it can inject ads at the end , middle and at the top-right or top-left your post.  If you are interested to show ads in the sidebar, then the best way is to simply paste the codes by creating a block in your sidebars.

Captcha

To fight against spam you must install the Captcha module, which has an option to show image captcha in order to make sure that your visitors are humans like us.

Custom search module

This module is a good way to show your visitors that you want them to stay a while in your blog by searching a few more contents. Take a look at the end of my post a wide search box, which is basically a custom search module.

Similar terms

This is a great way to grab your visitor’s attention to your blog. You can add this module to show a list of similar contents on your sidebar.

Menu

1. Taxonomy menu
2. Tag clouds

Drupal Taxonomy menu will let you show your menu that you create using taxonomy at any place of your blog. Another module called tags clouds can also help you the navigability of your contents. Basically, this tag clouds will show a list of useful tags at your sidebar or wherever you want to show it.

Featured content

It is an effective way to promote you best contents in a featured post section at the top of your blog.  To add this functionality in your blog you have to download a module called “featured content”; after uploading it to your module section, you need to configure it in order to show the contents from your preferred categories.

Disqus comment box

You have to download Disqus comment box module from its site. The best part of it is that it will let your users make comments using their social network identity such as Facebook, Twitter etc.

All the modules have been discussed in this post has been functioning well with Drupal 7, without any major or even minor problems. To download all these modules, you need to go at Drupal.org and then search for these modules with the name as mentioned above.