Thursday, June 12, 2008

Drupal Modules

I have spent much of the last few days researching Drupal (as I have been reporting).  I thought I might share some of useful bits I've picked up regarding modules.  Modules allows an administrator to extend the functionality of their Drupal installation.  Developers can create their own modules but there are plenty of modules already out there, and a few of them are considered "must haves" depending on the scope of your site.  I've listed a few of them below with brief descriptions.

CCK (Content Creation Kit): This allows fields to be added to add custom fields and node types.  S for example if you have a news site, you might want to add an author node type CCK would allow for that in addition you could add an author field to the article creation node.  

Views: This allows an admin to provide multiple views for a piece of content.  For example if you had a record store website you could write out a full description of an album with cover image and music player and than use views to display that album with limited information for a list view.  

Panels: This allows non-coders to achieve complex page layouts, it's a great solution if your going to build a site and then hand it off. 

Organic Groups: Allows admins or users to create there own sub-sites similar to Google Groups.  Great solution for collaborations or 

Workflow: Allows fine grain control of content publishing.  For example if your running a news site and you have multiple authors submitting articles but want all articles to be reviewed by an editor before they are finally published than this module is for you.

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