10 Best Drupal 7 Modules Of 2017

This post was originally published at Cloudways Blog.

Do you have a Drupal 7 website or are interested in developing a website using Drupal’s most popular version?

Well then, you are in luck, because Drupal 7 has boatloads of themes and modules available for spicing up your website. I have previously written about the most popular Drupal 7 themes in 2017. In this article, I’ll be highlighting the most popular modules for Drupal 7 in 2017.

As you may know, modules are essential components of this excellent content management system. They add extra functionality to your website and make it as powerful as you wish. So without much further ado, let’s start with the list of popular 2017 Drupal 7 modules.

1. Chaos Tool Suite
2. Token
3. Libraries API
4. Pathauto
5. Entity API
6. Jquery Update
7. Administration Menu
8. Webform
9. Date
10. IMCE

Chaos Tool Suite

Undoubtedly, the most popular and a very powerful module in the entire sea of modules for Drupal 7, Chaos Tool Suite has more than a whopping 8 million downloads and is currently being used in over 900k websites. These sheer numbers are a perfect testament to its popularity.

This Suite is basically a library of APIs and tools that greatly eases development. Features include the ability to make it easy for modules to let other modules implement plugins from .inc files. To check out the complete list of features of Chaos Tool Suite, head over to its official page.

This module is created by Earl Miles.

Token

In Drupal, Tokens are a special string of text that acts as placeholders. They are used to generate strings dynamically, such as a name in a welcome message. This helps avoid hard-coded strings for dynamic values. Token are used for dynamic properties such as date, time etc.

This module adds tokens that are not available in Drupal 7 by default. To check out the complete list of tokens in Drupal 7, check out the official Drupal documentation here. Do note though that the tokens available on your website will depend on the modules that you have enabled.

This module is contributed by Dave Reid.

Libraries API

This module allows developers to use external libraries such as Jquery in Drupal websites. As such, it is a very simple yet very powerful module that often plays a vital role in extending Drupal’s development possibilities.

This module is contributed by Daniel Kudwien.

Pathauto

As I mentioned in my Drupal SEO article, clean and understandable URL are essential for your website’s search engine optimization. In this context, it is hard to overlook Pathauto, a very powerful module that automatically creates understandable and clean URLs for various components of your Drupal website such as nodes, taxonomies etc. Note that this module requires Token and Chaos Tools module to be installed on the website.

This module is again, contributed by the venerable Dave Reid.

Entity API

This module provides a unified manner of handling entities and their properties by extending Drupal core’s entity API. For in-depth coverage of this module, check out the official page.

This module is contributed by Wolfgang Ziegler.

Jquery Update

A pretty much self-explanatory module; it updates the Jquery version in the Drupal core to the latest release of the library. This module comes to us courtesy of Jeff Robins.

Administration Menu

As a Drupal website developer, the administration panel is probably where you spend most of your time. Drupal’s native admin panel is pretty bland and (very) confusing to newcomers. This module aims to address this issue by providing CSS/JS based menu for the admin panel. You can get the complete information for this module on its official page.

Again, Daniel Kudwin is behind this very helpful module.

Webform

If you have ever developed a website, you understand the central importance of the forms. This module greatly eases the process of creating forms for your website. Not only this, you can also use it to send customized emails upon completion, get the results and import these results into a spreadsheet.

The developer-friendly module is created by Nate Haug.

Date

As you could guess from the name, this module provides a date/time field. In addition, this module exposes an API that other modules could use. Note that this module has been included in Drupal 8’s core.

This module was submitted by VijayChandran Mani.

IMCE

IMCE is an AJAX based image and file uploader/ browser. The module is simple but effective and very useful.

We’ve got ufku to thank for this module.

Conclusion

These are the actively-maintained Drupal modules that will popular in 2017 and beyond. I hope you found this post useful. If you are looking for Drupal 8 modules, then you can check out my post about the must have Drupal 8 modules for 2017.