Drupal

I work with the open source content management system Drupal on a daily basis, I've designed sites for local and international organisations. Modules are essential for my work, these are the ones I work with everyday and use in some fashion on almost every website.

1. CCK - Content Construction Kit

Almost every website will need to define content fields in some way so that it is easy for the user to enter data and to report off, the CCK module gives you this flexibility to do this. These can be anything from simple number and text fields to select boxes, radio buttons and image upload fields. CCK is one of the main reasons Drupal is a flexible platform allowing for the quick development of website.

More:www.drupal.org/project/cck

2. Views

Being able to store all your data is great however what really matters is how you display this data to the end user. By being able to select what fields you want to display, pass arguments and setup filters, Views is incredibly powerful and goes hand in hand with CCK.

More: www.drupal.org/project/views

3. Panels

Panels is a great way to mix different views and blocks into the same page in different columns. The panels module comes with either two or three column layouts giving some great flexibiltiy to page design.

More: www.drupal.org/project/panels

4. Pathauto

Clean URL's are a great way to give a more descriptive URL, the path auto module allows you to automatically generate different urls for different types of content. For example on ImAFish it differentiates imafish.co.uk/blog/??? and imafish.co.uk/articles/??? .

More: www.drupal.org/project/pathauto

5. TinyMCE

TinyMCE integrates a Javascript WYSIWYG editor into Drupal providing an easy way to add formatting to pages. It doesn't matter about the type of site I'm building, the client always needs a way to easily edit a pages content. TinyMCE makes this goal possible, I don't think there has been a Drupal site to date where I haven't integrated TinyMCE in.

More: www.drupal.org/project/tinymce

6. IMCE

IMCE integrates an image upload box into TinyMCE and provides basic controls for resizing images. IMCE is here for a similar reason that TinyMCE is, people love to put pictures on web pages and usually these start out on a users computer. IMCE provides an easy way to upload these images so that they can be positioned on a page with TinyMCE.

More: www.drupal.org/project/imce

7.  Captcha

Spam submissions plague the Internet, and the captcha module nicely integrates with registration, login, commenting and a number of other fields to help stop spammers. The captcha comes in two forms, either letters or a simple mathmatical equation.

More: www.drupal.org/project/captcha

8. Token

Token makes a number of place holders available to other modules allowing you to easily build up strings to be used to buid arguments.

More: www.drupal.org/project/token

9. XMLSitemap

The XMLSitemap module automatically generates and submits sitemaps to a number of search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN. A great module to help with search engine optimization. 

More: www.drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap

10. Google Analytics

The Analytics module is a simple one that just gives you the ability to add Googles visitor tracking software to your site.

More: www.drupal.org/project/google_analytics

It's been a while since I've updated Comment Luv for Drupal and I've had a number of requests for a update for Drupal 6.

I've been talking to Andy from FiddyP who's updated his version for Wordpress recently and I hope to have an updated version of Comment Luv within the coming weeks. I've not used Drupal 6 much yet so this will be a good chance to learn some of the updates, I had been waiting for the CCK and Views modules to come out of beta before starting any work on Drupal 6 (I've not used it on any production sites at work yet either).

 I know there are a fair number of sites out there using Comment Luv which is great.

Comment Luv Drupal is the Drupal based version of the popular Wordpress plugin.

When someone posts a comment on your site Comment Luv attempts to find their latest blog post and add the title and link to the bottom of their comment. Comment Luv is great for attracting people to comment on your blogs and a great way to build back links to your site.

The development release 0.1 is the same as what is used here on ImAFish. The Comment Luv Wordpress plugin has been written by Andy Baily of FiddyP, with his permission and guidance I have simply removed the Wordpress hooks and replaced them with Drupal hooks.

Download

Currently for Drupal 5x.

Download the development release 0.1.

Installation

1. Upload the commentluv directory to your modules folder.

2. Download Magpie RSS from Sourceforge and copy all the files into the commentluv directory. 

3. Go to the modules section in the administration section and enable.

Limitations

There are a few limitations currently that I hope to work on over the coming releases.

1. Once enabled the comment luv plugin works on all content types, there is no way to turn it off for certain content types (if there is demand for this feature I will write it).

2. Currently Comment Luv only works for anonymous users, I intend to add in functionality for authenticated users soon.

3. Not tested on Drupal 6.

This module development has been sponsored by The Web Orchard.