Ossmedia.com

Make Drupal Sites Efficient

Modules That Make Drupal Sites Efficient

OSSMedia Ltd.
Web Development
Published in
8 min readOct 17, 2013

--

Often, people take entry in Drupal club with intentions of creating an extremely efficient and easily manageable website. Technically, Drupal is capable in creating high profile websites with all needed technical facilities that proprietary software can give. However, it depends on the technical knowledge & personal interest of the developer.

Usually, Drupal programmers love to take sufficient time to create a value added website for their customers. They also want to use some paid modules in websites but face rejection from their clients. It kills their personal interest. Therefore, if you are going to create your website then this post can easily help you. Here you will get to know about some great Drupal Modules, which can increase the efficiency of a Drupal website.

Drupal

PathAuto

Well, it is an intelligent tool for all websites based on this CMS tool. You just need to install this tool to ensure the search engine friendliness of your URLs. It will automatically optimize the web page URLs of your website. Therefore, you will not have to do this manually.

PathAuto

Mollom

You might be aware of this renowned content moderator. It recognizes the content patterns and saves your website from being spammed with similar looking contents. In short, this module works like a real content moderator.

Mollom

Google Analytics

Well, there is no need to give any identification of this module. It is simply a necessary module. You just need to get this plugin to understand the flow of traffic at your website. With this plugin, you can actively take part in the online marketing process.

Google Analytics

reCapthca

You might be aware of the resourceful role of CAPTCHA in preventing spamming on any website. Now, you will be able to use a more refined tool called ‘reCaptcha’. This tool efficiently secures the email ids submitted into a form.

ReCaptcha

Open Altrium

If you are looking for running a small company with your couple of friends but lacking an intranet module then it is the best tool for you. It simply connects with your website and lets you manage your tasks and work collaboratively with your friends.

Open Altrium

Menu Block

It is an amazing tool for configuring menu tree that can includes all the menus and levels of your website. So, you just need to get this plugin for your website

Drupal Menu

Calendar

With the help of this module, you can check each view of your website in day, week, month, and yearly models. It is quite helpful module for newbie website managers.

Calender

Webform

It is truly a helping module for your website. It simply lets you create contact forms and petitions. Moreover, you will not have to plunge into the ocean of codes.

Webform

Drupal Commerce

It is one of the most touted modules for adding e-commerce functionalities in your Drupal website. You just need to install this tool to enable online retailing features in your website.

Drupal Commerce

Media

With this module, you will be able to get over from the Drupal’s notorious file management process.

Media

Grow Like a Problogger with Drupal Blog

Everyone you see around you in blogging sphere want to name a successful after his or her name. The blogging world is full of ideas, especially innovative & groundbreaking ideas. Hence, all bloggers love to share their parts of traffic because they know traffic is not permanent in blogging world. The only reality that exists is that the consistent outflow of innovative ideas in form of contents ensures liveliness of a blog. Additionally, the technical soundness also plays a vital role in giving a medium to crazy bloggers for spreading their ideas. So, you require a technically sound CMS for managing your blog and if you have chosen Drupal for this purposes then you have really taken a perfect decision. You just need to learn some tricks of online marketing to make your blog posts earn millions of fans.

# Gather Knowledge

Well, you must gather the knowledge as much as you can in order to grow decisively in your blogging sphere. For instance, if you are covering sociopolitical or human rights related issues then you must learn the art of presenting your thoughts in an interesting manner. Further, you should have a bank of information regarding the topic that you are going to cover in your blog. It will make your blogging substantial and data-driven.

# Learn to Viral Your Thoughts

Yes! It is right. You should learn the new mediums like Twitter, Pinterest, and Stumble Upon to make your thoughts travel fast on virtual platform. It will help you in bringing more readers on your website. For this purpose, you should learn the way of developing great contents for your blog, which can be shared on these sites.

# Master Social Media Marketing

In last few years, social media has emerged like the most innovative medium to come in touch with a person living miles ahead us. Gradually, these sites are giving freedom to bloggers to share their blog posts and opinions with like-minded people. Therefore, you should understand the mechanism of Facebook & Twitter marketing. It will help you in sharing your posts effectively. Considerably, Drupal provides social media integration feature. So, you will not have to do sweat yourself unnecessarily.

# Fix Initial SEO Optimization Issues

Reasonably, bloggers do not understand much about the on-page search engine optimization of their blogs. They simply want to write and earn readerships. However, if you are not in motion of spending much on blogging then you should learn using some of the best SEO friendly features of your CMS. For instance, Drupal provides URL rewriting services. Therefore, you should use this feature for creating SEO friendly web page URL of your website. In this way, you will get a feat in your rankings. There are some other features available in Drupal that you can use to get a feat in your business.

Is Drupal the Greatest CMS Ever Made?

CMS

Drupal is far more than just an open source website CMS. It provides a superior environment for building and managing a web presence. Millions of corporate websites, social networking sites, product catalogs, e-Commerce stores has been developed for various businesses, non-profit organizations, government and educational organizations around the world.

The Wow Factor

When compared to other CMSs, developers prefer Drupal for its ease to build, maintain and update features. In addition Drupal presents us with great flexibility, thus enabling infinite possibilities. These include and are not limited to ability to create different layout on each page of the website using blocks, embed social media group widgets, discussion board, multi-lingual tools, mapping tools, infinite number of customizable user roles and content types etc.

Ever since its inception Drupal has been tagged as the most “developer-friendly CMS” ever made. But that can also mean that it’s not a ready-made (like WordPress) tool. We did not have tools such as WYSIWYG editors in the beginning of the Drupal era. So, one had to hand-code each and every element of the website. In other words, if someone was using Drupal, they had to actually employ some of the most complex tools available on the web to build a website.

However things changed with the arrival of Drupal 7. With Drupal 7, Drupal too found a spot in the list of “user-friendly” CMS tools. Various modules such as Panels, Webforms, and Views were introduced so as to make the website creation simple and fun for the end-users. The good news is that Drupal developers around the world are working hard so as to make it even more user-friendly with the next release.

Drupal is extensively known for its powerful taxonomy and ability to categorize and tag. It lets you organize complex content in a simple and easy way.

The Flip-Side of the Coin

As we know that nothing in this world is perfect. This applies to Drupal too. Other CMSs like WordPress and Magento are also doing great and sometimes outperform Drupal. For example, Drupal lags behind WordPress when it comes to user-friendliness. Believe it or not, but user-friendliness is the most sought-after feature in any CMS. Although the Drupal community is huge and is always willing to contribute, but the Drupal development is heavily dependent upon the community of developers. Therefore, Drupal advances only when developers fix or create things that matters most to them.

Unlike WordPress Drupal cannot be recommended to small-time users who have just one blog to run. Drupal needs hosting, maintenance, site building and customization, and debugging, which can cost a lot more time and money which makes it suitable only for enterprises.

The Verdict

It is true that Drupal requires the most technical expertise of the three CMSs. However, the hard work pays off as it is capable of producing some of the most complex, advanced and versatile sites, for example the sites that require complex data organization and multiple user profiles. It is becoming easier to use with each version.

Note:-

Now, you have read almost all the golden tricks to earn value for your blog. Therefore, you should start planning your ride to become the problogger of your domain. It will be an interesting and memorable process of your blogging career.

--

--

OSSMedia Ltd.
Web Development

OSSMedia is a leading software consulting service with 5+ years of expertise.