Modules of the Month: Shiny new Drupal modules from December 2012

Lowell Montgomery
Modules of the month story banner illustration.

Closing out the year 2012 with a bang, December brought us quite a number of new modules which look promising enough to cover; a few that I’m covering this time are far from ready or even only at the “concept” stage and normally would not be included, but they seemed particularly interesting or unique, and I want to see how they develop. Anyway, this month there were quite a few modules released for mobile support/responsive content. There were also several search-related modules, anti-spam modules, a couple of novelty modules, some interesting commerce-related releases, a number of Features package modules customized for various special-purpose distributions, lots of new “Third-party Integration” modules, theme enhancements, and more… I only wish I had more time so I could actually try out more of them, but there are several I do plan to get back to.

As usual, this post is sorted alphabetically and only covers modules which had their first release, or at least a new project created, in December. Selection for the Modules of the Month is a completely arbitrary process, but normally excludes common or niche items like a new payment method for Commerce that provides connections for a payment system used in, e.g. Romania. We also don’t normally include commercial service integration modules (unless the service looks really cool and is reasonably priced).

Anyway, it seems like only last week that I was putting the final touches on the November “Modules of the Month” story… oh wait, it was only last week: nine days ago, as I write this. Well I promised to try to get December’s published in early January, so I pushed some days around to make this happen. Let’s take a look at the modules, then, shall we? …

Activation Code

Categories: Developer, Examples, User Access & Authentication, Utility

The Activation Code module, brought to us by prolific über-contributor Bryan Ollendyke of Penn State University, provides a fieldable “activation_code” entity type with a number of fields for an ID, creation timestamp, redemption timestamp, username, etc. It’s used by the Course Information System distribution as another method for authorizing access to online course materials, etc, but for those who don’t need the module on their site, it could still provide a useful example for how to build a fieldable entity.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Are You A Human PlayThru

Categories: Spam Prevention, User Access & Authentication

Are You a Human Playthru login

The Are You A Human PlayThru module, written by Chris Keller of Commercial Progression, provides a more simple, fun, and intuitive means for a user to prove they are human than typical CAPTCHA options. It uses game mechanics which a user interacts with rather than having users try to interpret text in graphics. CAPTCHA fields can be frustratingly and tedious, so it’s nice to see people are working on interesting alternatives. Cool! I often skip over commercial third-party integration modules, but this seems interesting enough not to pass up, and they do provide free options which might be adequate for many sites.

Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.

Backstretch Formatter

Categories: Content Display, Third-party Integration

The Backstretch Formatter module, written by Yannick Leyendecker of LOOM GmbH, provides a field formatter for jQuery Backstretch - A simple jQuery plugin that allows you to add a dynamically-resized, slideshow-capable background image to any page or element. Once you have everything (JavaScript libraries and the module, etc) correctly installed, if you select “Backstretch” as field formatter for an image field which allows more than one image you will get a slideshow. If your slideshow needs don’t require anything too fancy, this could be the ideal module to implement it. Cool!

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Badbot

Categories: Administration, Spam Prevention, User Access & Authentication

Because we wouldn’t want one CAPTCHA alternative to be lonely… the Badbot module, developed by Yuriy Babenko of Suite101, provides another method of CAPTCHA-free spam-prevention; it is currently limited to the user registration form, but comment forms are in the works. Visitors must have JavaScript enabled in their browsers for this system to work; it displays an error if JavaScript is disabled. Since spam bots generally do not parse JS, this helps avoid the need for CAPTCHAs, which are often solved by low-paid workers these days, anyway.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

BetterTip

Categories: JavaScript Utilities, Theme Enhancements, Utility

The BetterTip module, produced by Shoaib Rehman Mirza of Xululabs, is a lightweight jQuery plugin for clean, HTML5-valid tooltips which can provide a richer user experience than default tooltip text.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7 (and the project page includes a pledge to provide a Drupal 6 version).

Better comments administration

Categories: Administration, JavaScript Utilities, Views

The Better comments administration module, written by Brian Gilbert of Realityloop, adds a Panels/Views -based comments administration page with AJAX-enabled publish/unpublish (and approve/reject) buttons, plus an AJAX-enabled comment preview functionality. Of course, being Views and Panels/Page manager -based, everything is highly configurable and exportable and you are probably already using Views, Panels and Chaos Tools, so you might already have activated most required/desirable modules. Page manager (a sub-module within the Chaos Tools suite) is recommended, but not required, as is Views Autocomplete Filters. Assuming your site permits comments, this should definitely be a useful tool in the regular workflow of eliminating spam and other promotional drivel.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Breakpoint Panels

Categories: Content Display, Mobile

The Breakpoint Panels module, developed by Daniel Linn of Metal Toad Media, adds a Panel style called “Breakpoint Panel”. When selected, it will display checkboxes next to all of the breakpoints specified in that module’s UI. Unchecking any of these will “hide” it from that breakpoint. If you are lost by this description of the functionality, it probably helps to understand that “breakpoints” define different display-width ranges so that you can determine layout for content on different width devices or even eliminate some content from being displayed on, e.g. devices less than 480 pixels wide. Of course it depends on the Breakpoints module, whose functionality is going into Drupal 8 “core”, and Panels, but you’ll also need to download some Javascript files and enable them with Libraries. See the project page for further details, but this could definitely help improve mobile/responsive content and the roadmap looks good, too.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Christmas Lights

Categories: Games and Amusements, Novelty

The Christmas Lights module, created by Andrew Podlubnyj, is, depending on your use case, of course, probably just a novelty module, but one that might be fun to enable in the right season. It adds decorative “Christmas lights” for you and your users to enjoy.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

CKEditor for WYSIWYG Module

Categories: Content, Third-party Integration

When Nathan Haug of Lullabot-fame releases a new module, it’s always GoodStuff™, so it’s no surprise that there are already hundreds of sites using the CKEditor for WYSIWYG Module after just one month. It provides a WYSIWYG editor (surprise, surprise!) using the CKEditor library (surprise, again!). This project aims to combine some of the best of the Wysiwyg-module integration with CKEditor with the best of the standalone CKEditor-integration module, with support for the Drupal Image and Drupal Image captioning plugins, compatibility with other WYSIWYG editors integrated through the Wysiwyg module, and no inline styles inserted into HTML… among other nice features either already implemented or in the “roadmap”. It requires the Wysiwyg module and is incompatible with the normal CKEditor integration module (which must be completely removed before using this module).

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Coins wallet

Categories: E-commerce, Third-party Integration

The Coins wallet module, authored by ssm2017 Binder, is a Bitcoin wallet system to be used with a devcoin-compatible daemon. This module is a complete rewrite for Drupal 7 of the never-released original Drupal 6 version discussed here and uses the bitcoin-php library. While I confess that I’m a bit leery of how this all works, I’m also fascinated by the idea of alternative currencies which aren’t controlled and manipulated by bankers and other “white collar criminals”, so while the optimist in me is curious to see how this works, the pessimist in me worries that between human greed and governmental attempts to rein this in, well… interesting work, in any case.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Collapsible fieldset memory

Categories: Administration, Content, Content Display, Site Navigation, Utility

The Collapsible fieldset memory module, written by David Herminghaus, solves a nice little UX issue for Drupal. If you have ever worked on a project where you had to enter content into Drupal forms with fieldsets which needed to be uncollapsed to access required fields, or where closing fieldsets to get them out of your way is part of your workflow, you might like this module. It allows everyone, even anonymous users, to have stored defaults for any Drupal form with collapsible fieldsets, so if a fieldset on a form was uncollapsed when you last used it, it will start out that way the next time you do. Nice! Of course it requires Javascript (as do collapsible fieldsets). The developer is open to feature requests and issues, so pitch in if you use this module and help make it better. There’s a bit you should know about before implementing it on your site, so be sure to peruse the project page.

Status: There are alpha releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.

Comment plus

Categories: Content, Content Display, Filters/Editors, JavaScript Utilities, Site Navigation

The Comment plus module, also by David Herminghaus, extends Drupal’s “core” comment functions with some extra features and per-content-type configuration options, with quite a long list of nice-to-have improvements. If you have a site which allows comments, you may well want to use this. And if you can think of other appropriate features, the author is actively seeking suggestions in the module’s issue queue, so your input can help.

Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 6. A port for Drupal 7 will be made once the module is considered “beta”.

Commerce Check

Categories: E-commerce

The Commerce Check module, contributed by Lev Tsypin of ThinkShout, provides a basic Drupal Commerce payment processor for checks.

Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.

Commerce Message

Categories: E-commerce

The Commerce Message module, produced by Bojan Živanović of Commerce Guys, provides Commerce-specific Message integration, including some default message settings for common order states, such as “order paid”, “product added to cart”, “order confirmation”, etc. It looks like a pretty well-thought-out module to help provide automated or custom messages to clients at appropriate stages in their order process. It’s integrated with Commerce Backoffice and Commerce Kickstart v2, so is already in use on quite a number of sites.

Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.

Commons Polls

Categories: Community

The Commons Polls module, by Ezra Barnett Gildesgame of Acquia, and the primary maintainer of Drupal Commons, integrates Drupal’s “core” Poll module as a group-enabled content type in Drupal Commons 3.0.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Commons Tooling

Categories: Community, Developer

The Commons Tooling module, is another contribution by Acquia’s Ezra Barnett Gildesgame; it’s a toolkit for setting up a Commons testing environment and then running tests on it.

Status: There is no release, yet, per se, but there is a repository you can clone (still only “master” branch).

Content callback

Categories: Content, Developer

If you register a content callback via hook_content_callback_info() it will be available in the Content callback field options.

—Project description excerpt

The Content callback module, developed by Jasper Knops of Nascom, allows you to return any renderable array, created in code, via a field; it also contains a sub-module which provides a searchable Views display, as well as a context condition, among other features you should check out on the project page. If it’s not clear, though, I might mention this is not a simple add-and-enable module; it provides some tools for coders and advanced site builders.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Context Breakpoint

Categories: Content Display, Theme Enhancements

The Context Breakpoint module, developed by Christoph, helps bridge Context and Breakpoints so that you can alter a page based on the visitor’s screen resolution, browser window size, or aspect ratio. Installing it adds a context condition for “Breakpoint”. This could definitely be useful, especially if your site already uses Context. Of course it’s a bit complex, so please see the project page and the module’s README file for information about how to install, configure, and make use of this.

Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.

Context code

Categories: Developer

The Context code is another module by Jasper Knops of Nascom. It provides “a new context condition plugin which allows you to trigger contexts from code”. It should probably go without saying that it requires the Context module and is a module developed for other developers. See the project page for implementation examples, but I think this looks very useful, at least for advanced Drupalists and coders.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

CP2P2: Content Profile to Profile2

Categories: Drush, Import/Export, Utility

The CP2P2: Content Profile to Profile2 module, written by Damien McKenna of Mediacurrent, is an add-on for Profile2 to convert Content Profile content types into Profile types. Note that there is no admin user interface for this; all functionality is provided by Drush commands run in the terminal, so this module is targeted toward experienced Drupalists and coders.

Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.

Create and continue

Categories: Administration, Content, Utility

The Create and continue module, written by Dominique De Cooman of Ausy/DataFlow, simply adds a button to node forms which saves the current node and opens node/add/CONTENT_TYPE to create another instance of the same node type and help streamline the content creation process.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Crossdomain

Categories: Media

The Crossdomain module, written by Adam Moore of Stanford Graduate School of Business, simply creates a crossdomain.xml file at the root of your Drupal site and provides configuration setting for which domains should be included. This is useful for certain web services which may require different domains to have access to your site content.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Currency for Drupal Commerce

Categories: Commerce/Advertising, Content Display, E-commerce, Multilingual

The Currency for Drupal Commerce module, produced by Bart Feenstra replaces the native currency-based price display in Drupal Commerce with locale-based display, using the Currency module. Because proper display depends on locale (language and country) and not on currencies, this module helps ensure that users see prices in a format they are used to.

Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.

Field Quick Required

Categories: Administration, Fields

The Field Quick Required module, written by Jelle Sebreghts of attiks, provides a simple overview of which field are required for a given content type, without having to enter the settings for that field. You can also change the “required” setting for any field. Nice! It does this by adding an extra column to the “manage fields” overview for your content types, e.g. for /admin/structure/types/manage/article/fields, where you would normally have columns for “Label”, “Machine name”, “Field type”, “Widget”, and “Operations”, you would also have a column labeled “Required” with a checkbox that can easily be changed if you decide a certain field should (or should not) be required for a particular content type. This could be especially useful during the initial phases of designing a site’s content types and logic.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

"File Metadata Table" Field Formatter

Categories: Fields

The "File Metadata Table" Field Formatter module, written by Jeremy Thorson, with support from Derek Wright, looks interesting. It’s still in development, but it provides a customizable “File Metadata Table” field formatter for file fields. All of the options are a bit much to list here, but given the profiles of these two super-contributors, I think this will be an interesting module to check back on. I’m expecting something awesome here!

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Foresight Images

Categories: Mobile, Third-party Integration

The Foresight Images module, developed by Graham Bates of Catch Digital, provides a field formatter which integrates the foresight.js library to display image fields. Images are requested and generated at the exact size required. As with other such third-party Javascript library integrations, this will require Libraries and you install the additional JavaScript code in sites/all/libraries. I’m not convinced that this module offers enough benefits to select it rather than one of the other more-established responsive image modules; I’m also not convinced otherwise and the Foresight Images project page includes a list of other “similar” responsive images modules and some brief notes about how the approach or features differ from those provided by Foresight Images. So this project page could be worth looking at if you need an overview to help choose the appropriate module(s) or approach for your next project.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Forum notifications

Categories: Community

The Forum notifications module, created by David Snopek, extends the Notifications module to add some nice UI improvements for notifications involving forums based on the “core” Forums module. If you have a site with forums and wish to have a nice user experience for “subscribing” (and “unsubscribing”) to forums or individual threads, this module could help.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7 and a beta release available for Drupal 6.

htaccess

Categories: Administration

The htaccess module, coded by giorgio79, autogenerates a Drupal root htaccess file based on your settings, including such configuration settings as automatic insertion of Boost htaccess settings, whether or not to use “www”, Followsymlinks or SymlinksIfOwnersMatch, etc. You simply configure these settings at /admin/config/system/htaccess if this module is enabled and of course you could only enable this module when upgrading Drupal, to replace the default .htaccess with one based on your settings. I don’t think it should be so dangerous to try this, but you might want to make your own backup copy of your current .htaccess file, just in case anything goes wrong (in theory, this module should also make a backup copy of your existing .htaccess file).

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Image optimize effect

Categories: File Management, Media

The Image optimize effect module, yet another contributed by Peter Droogmans of Attiks, adds two new image effects to optimize image files to reduce your average page size. Most websites do not have very well optimized images and images can be substantially reduced in size, even without noticeable change in quality. This module uses pngquant to optimize png files and imgmin, which can work on various formats, but is best for JPEG files. Of course it depends on the relevant libraries (see the project description). For more information, see this recent article on the Performance Calendar blog: Giving Your Images an Extra Squeeze

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Image Style Pregenerate

Categories: Administration, File Management, Utility

The Image Style Pregenerate module, developed by Gabor Szanto, helps you to generate all the images for a new image style before enabling the style; it’s designed for bulk image generation on production sites where the performance hit of switching the image style in your field formatter without already having the new images in place, could result in issues. It relies on Views Bulk Operations (VBO) and File Entity.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Insert image with text

Categories: Content

The Insert image with text module, developed by Esben von Buchwald of Reload!, extends the Insert module to modify the image markup to include caption text below the image. I don’t know how this compares to other methods of adding an image caption, but if you are already using Insert, and you want a simple way to include image captions, this module could be useful.

Status: There are dev releases available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.

Joyride

Categories: Community, JavaScript Utilities, Novelty, Site Navigation

The Joyride module, written by Mark Koester of Int3c.com: International Cross-Cultural Consulting, integrates the Joyride plugin to provide a simple way to give a tour of features or information on your Drupal-based site. This looks pretty cool. Of course you need to download the Javascript and install it in your sites/all/libraries directory… and of course that means it also requires the Libraries module.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

jQuery Tabs Field

Categories: Content, Content Display, Fields

The jQuery Tabs Field module, contributed by Varun Mishra, allows you to create up to seven tab fields, each with a “body” and “tab title” on any node where this field is part of the content type. On viewing the node, the module will format the output to display each as horizontal tabs, which can make for more attractive output. This is relatively simple compared to options where you could have a number of fields in each tab, but if it fills the requirements of your use case, this simplicity would be ideal. There are already quite a few sites using this and it should become much more useful when the “body” of each tab supports HTML formats (currently it only accepts plain text, but the first issue for this module has elicited a promise to get HTML support in there.)

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Kazoo API

Categories: Third-party Integration

The Kazoo API module, contributed by Bevan Rudge of Drupal.geek.nz, integrates the Kazoo REST API telecommunications platform into Drupal-based sites. This is fairly complex and the use cases for this are somewhat limited, so I’m not going to bother going into great detail, but it’s interesting to know about, nonetheless.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Kim Jong-filter

Categories: Content Display, Novelty

The Kim Jong filter is used to highlight specified words or phrases within content

The Kim Jong-filter module, coded by the prolific Peter Lieverdink of Creative Contingencies, provides an input filter that wraps all occurrences of names of great leaders in a <span> element with a suitable class for easy highlighting. Of course you could use it for other purposes, so this might be more than an odd novelty module.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Language fallback

Categories: Multilingual

The Language fallback module, written by Peter Droogmans, a very active contributor who has done a lot for multilingual functionality in Drupal, allows you to specify a fallback language for each language on your site, so if a string is found untranslated in the preferred language, you can get the next closest language translation file. Example use cases are for regional variants of a language, so if there is no translation in “nl-be” (Belgian Dutch), it would default to a translation found in Netherlands Dutch “nl-nl” and finally default to a standard translation found in “nl”, if available. This could certainly be useful and I believe this is a backport of functionality that’s already been built into Drupal 8 “core” (if not, I suspect it will be ported to Drupal 8 as a contrib module).

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Layouter - WYSIWYG layout templates

Categories: Content, Content Display

The Layouter module helps create templates within content to facilitate columns or other layouts.

The Layouter - WYSIWYG layout templates module, from Alexander of ADCI, LLC, provides a simple way to select a particular “layout” (e.g. columns) for content. It already integrates with the CKEditor and the developer plans support for other popular editors, but it can apparently be used without a WYSIWYG editor, too.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Lazyloader filter

Categories: Filters/Editors, Media

The Lazyloader filter module, authored by Derek Webb of CollectiveColors, provides an input filter for lazy loading images as they may appear in textareas and relies on the Lazyloader project for the actual lazy-loading of images. This module only provides a filter that renders <img> tags in a manner consistent with the needs of the Lazyloader module, while allowing you to theme the image output to your liking and preserve original image attributes. This looks useful.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Leaflet MapBox

Categories: Location

The Leaflet MapBox module, contributed by Jaime Herencia of WebPartners, provides integration between another Drupal contrib module, Leaflet (which integrates the Leaflet JavaScript mapping library), and MapBox. The Leaflet module’s project page actually links to an example which uses Mapbox: The Intertwine, which documents trails in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region. This site really looks cool, so if mapping functionality is important for your site, this might be useful for you.
Caveat: Mapbox is not a free service, but is reasonably priced and includes some pretty cool tools and features, not to mention distributed map hosting.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Local Foodhub

Categories: Commerce/Advertising, Features Package

Local Foodhub defines the commerce functionality to support a foodhub in a community, where producers and consumers attend a regular collection day where ordered products can be collected. Foodhubs are a convenient way to provide local produce for people in the community while giving producers more regular orders.

—Project description

The Local Foodhub module, developed by Paul Mackay, is a project description which definitely looks interesting, although there is, as of this time, no code released. Normally I don’t include modules in this column if there aren’t at least some Git code commits, but there is enough information already, and I like the idea well enough that I’m making an exception here. We need to have more local food production and distribution… and infrastructure to support this if we want to live in a future with more environmentally sustainable practices, so on behalf of my future children and grandchildren, I give thanks for people working on projects like this.

Status: Check back. Currently no project code.

Mobile Switch (Varnish version)

Categories: Mobile, Theme Enhancements

The Mobile Switch (Varnish version) module, developed by Paul Maddern of ITV, provides a simple automatic theme switch functionality for mobile devices, utilising Varnish for detecting the user-agent and providing proper cacheable pages using the same URLs per mobile device group. This helps avoid bootstrapping Drupal while still presenting the appropriate, cached content for each device type. Nice! Of course getting this all right is not simple, so be sure to peruse the project page for more complete implementation details.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Moodle Connector

Categories: Third-party Integration

The Moodle Connector module, produced by Pere Orga, aims to provide a common interface for modules that integrate Drupal with the open-source Moodle e-learning system. It does not provide any end-user features and the initial release simple adds an admin configuration page for you to enter Moodle credentials, but there are plans for some other appropriate features. If you have a site that bridges Drupal and Moodle, this could be a worthwhile module for you.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Multilingual Panels

Categories: Content Display, Multilingual

The Multilingual Panels module, created by Valeriy Sokolov, provides support for making Panels panes translatable, which could definitely be useful for multilingual sites which make use of Panels.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Organic Groups Comment Context

Categories: Content, Organic Groups (OG), User Access & Authentication

The Organic Groups Comment Context module, written by JOsh Beauregard of Knectar Design, adds an og_context for a nodes comment page so could be useful for many Organic Groups-based sites which allow node comments.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Organic Groups formatters

Categories: Organic Groups (OG)

The Organic Groups formatters module, produced by Eric Mulder of LimoenGroen, extends Organic Groups by adding additional field formatters for the “Groups Audience” field. The “Group delimited list” formatter allows you to display Group names (labels) as a delimited list. Other formatters may be added if requested in the issue queue.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Pants

Categories: Developer, Examples, Novelty

The Pants module, produced by Angie Byron of Acquia, is an actual module instead of just code used in a tutorial demonstration, but the purpose is the same. The previous version of the Pants “module” (not actually released) was for Drupal 5. This project updates it to Drupal 7 code and may be used as part of Angie’s DrupalCon Sydney core conversation presentation about “Upgrading your modules”, which will cover getting Drupal 7 code ready to run in Drupal 8.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

PDF Forms API

Categories: Developer, Third-party Integration

The PDF Forms API module, authored by Kevin Kaland of WizOne Solutions, is an API module which you should only install if another module requires it or if you are a developer and want to use its functions, which are initially focused on PDF form functionality.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Pinterest Verify Website

Categories: Third-party Integration

The Pinterest Verify Website module, written by Peter Lieverdink of Creative Contingencies, simplifies the verication process for pinterest by adding a verification tag or page to a Drupal site.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Polychotomous Keys

Categories: Content, Utility

The Polychotomous Keys module, written by Ed Baker of the Natural History Museum, “allows you to build polychotomous keys using Views”. At least that is the “project description”, but currently there is not even a single code commit. While that would normally mean I’d skip the project for inclusion here, I’m interested in modules being developed for academics and there could be a lot of use cases for such a module. I’m looking forward to seeing it in action.

Status: Check back. Currently no project code available.

Prelaunch

Categories: Administration, Content Display, User Access & Authentication

The Prelaunch module, written by Dominique De Cooman of Ausy/DataFlow, allows you to set one page of a Drupal site as “prelaunch page”. An example use case might be to display a webform to collect emails to notify interested parties when your site is launched, or page with information about what’s coming. Your site can essentially be “offline” without using maintenance mode; it prevents users from accessing any part of the site besides the prelaunch page (although assigned roles can access other areas). This definitely sounds useful.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Pushtape Admin

Categories: Features Package

Pushtape Music is actually a Drupal distribution for musicians, which was initially released about 18 months ago. So why am I including it here? Well, I’m not really, but there are five new Features package modules which were released in December which are all geared toward improving support for building sites with Pushtape and which might be useful even if you aren’t using the distribution. All of the following modules were contributed by Farsheed of Zirafa Works:

  • Pushtape Admin contains admin views and menus.
  • Pushtape Audio adds a simple file field to the Track content type to allow uploading mp3 files.
  • Pushtape Events configures an event content type, view, and menu link.
  • Pushtape News creates a news content type, view, and menu link.
  • Pushtape Photos creates a simple photo-set to share a group of photos. Content type, views, and menu link are bundled; this also uses Colorbox.

Status: For each of these modules, there are development releases available for Drupal 7.

Radix Layouts

Categories: Content Display, Theme Enhancements

The Radix Layouts module, produced by Arshad Chummun, provides responsive panels layouts set to work with Panopoly and the Radix theme (also contributed by Arshad Chummun). If you are using Panopoly, you might like Radix and if you are using Radix, you might like this module, especially if you need responsive layouts for mobile devices.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Restaurant

Categories: Administration, Content, Content Display, Features Package, Theme Enhancements

Restaurant is a new distribution, also developed by Arshad Chummun, which is based on Panopoly and designed to simplify hosting websites for restaurants. Several supporting modules were also released in December:

Status: There are development releases available for Drupal 7 for the Restaurant distribution and each of the listed supporting modules.

Search API Stanbol

Categories: RDF, Search, Third-party Integration

The Search API Stanbol module, written by Stéphane Corlosquet and Wolfgang Ziegler provides Drupal integration with Apache Stanbol, a new and exciting search technology for extracting information from “unstructured” text content. Getting into the full details of how this works is well outside the scope of this column, but this definitely does look interesting. This module requires the Search API and RDF Extensions modules.

Status: There is an alpha release available for Drupal 7.

Single Image Formatter

Categories: Fields

The Single Image Formatter module, created by Federico Jaramillo of SeeD, exposes a formatter that displays one image from a multi-value image field. It allows the same options as the original image formatter, but adds an option to choose which image to display. For some use cases, the Field multiple limit may be more suitable, but the Single Image Formatter might be more efficient for situations where there are many values in a multi-value image field.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Sky field

Categories: Administration, Content, Content Construction Kit (CCK), Content Display, Fields

The Sky field module, created by Leonid Mamaev and Alexander of ADCI, LLC, is sort of a new, improved version of the Node field module released a few months back by the same developers. It allows you to add unique custom fields to any single Drupal entity (node, user, comment, etc). You can add text fields, long text fields, links, radios, select, checkbox, taxonomy terms, among others and includes an API to add support for additional field types. This could be very useful for sites where an occasional instance might benefit from an extra field that isn’t normally used for that content type.

Status: There is a beta release available for Drupal 7.

Twitter Web Intents

Categories: Views

The Twitter Web Intents module, developed by Francisco José Cruz Romanos of Hiberus, integrates Twitter’s Web Intents system to add extra Twitter links for replying, retweeting, adding to favorites, following, etc, into a view of Twitter messages. This allows users to interact with Twitter content from within the context of your site, without needing to leave the page or authorize an app just for this interaction.

Status: There is a stable release available for Drupal 7.

Twysi

Categories: Third-party Integration

The Twysi module, created by Tony Star of Acronis, is “an amazing Twitter Bootstrap WYSIWYG HTML5 editor”, at least that’s what the project description says. But it might be a bit early to tell about the module, itself. Currently, if I install the wysihtml5 library, I can select it as the editor for a given text format, but no buttons are present and no editor shows up on a text area. That said, this does sound like a project worth checking back on.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

URL token

Categories: Content Access Control, User Access & Authentication, Utility

URL token is an API module that provides token-based authentication for other modules, where the token can be used in URLs without requiring a Drupal user. Tokens can also be limited to a set number of uses or a fixed period of time.

—from the project’s README.txt

The URL token module, by Marcus Deglos of Techito, is “an API module to make token-based access control simple”. Normal users should only install this module if another module requires it. Developers might want to take a look at the project page for some decent code examples of how to request a token and check that a token is valid. Note: in case this is not obvious, this module has nothing to do with the Token module. “Token”, in this context, is simply an access key.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Views OG cache

Categories: Organic Groups (OG), Performance and Scalability, Views

The Views OG cache module, from long-time contributor Amitai Burstein of Gizra, adds a Views time-based cache, configurable per group; uses OG-context to identify a group’s view to cache; includes OG-access integration: if the group is private, caching is done per-user instead of per-group… among other listed features. This definitely looks like it could be useful for sites using both Organic Groups and Views.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Welcome

Categories: Content Display, Utility

The Welcome module displays a custom message when users log in.

The Welcome module, from Blair Wadman displays a simple, configurable welcome message when a user logs in. Simply enable it at admin/config/people/welcome, and yes Token support is included. The example message displayed at left uses Tokens for both the site-name and username. (Of course the “Swachula” username is courtesy of “Devel generate” and “d7test” is my local Drupal 7 testing environment.)

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

WS Slideshow

Categories: Content Display, Third-party Integration

The WS Slideshow module, contributed by Svetoslav Stoyanov, integrates a Flash-based slideshow, generated by ws-slideshow as a node. I’m not a big fan of Flash, but you have to admit that ws-slideshow looks slick and is reasonably priced for commercial use (free for personal), so if you want a nice looking “Flashy” slideshow, this could be for you. Required contrib modules include: Filefield Sources, Plupload, FileField Sources Plupload, Transliteration, and, of course, Libraries.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

Yet Another Yellow Box

Categories: Content Display

This is mostly being used to announce weather-related school closings on sites where I've been using it.

—from the project description

The Yet Another Yellow Box module, authored by Micah Webner of Access-Interactive, provides a simple way to add a prominent “announcement” block of filtered text to any pre-configured region. The contents and visibility of the announcement block can then be managed by users who may not otherwise have permission to manage blocks. If you have a site where staff may need to make emergency announcements, this could be a useful module to set up. See the project page for further information about how to get everything working.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7 and a stable release available for Drupal 6.

Zoundation Support

Categories: Theme Enhancements, Utility

The Zoundation Support module, written by Jeff Graham of FunnyMonkey, is designed to work with the responsive HTML5-based zoundation theme and its sub-themes. It provides custom menu builder functions and blocks for menus, a foundation navbar and topbar, a custom field formatter for orbit slideshow integration, improved placeholder integration for elements, and “other minor UI improvements” that work better in this module than in the zoundation theme, itself.

Status: There is a development release available for Drupal 7.

 

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Lowell Montgomery

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Lowell Montgomery works for Kairion, a subsidiary of Cocomore. He joined Cocomore to extend his skills in Drupal during an initial internship. Today, Lowell is kept busy in his role as Kairion’s Head of Quality Assurance, but he is still interested in Drupal and visits Drupalcons, DrupalCamps, code sprints, and other Drupal community events, whenever he has the chance.