More Drupal Discoveries

Much of my time the last two months has been spent working on Drupal. Some of this work has been related to the library’s new intranet, some has been research for a book chapter and some is in the vein of using Drupal for digital library content.

In some ways, the last area has taught me the most about the power of Drupal, because it stretches Drupal the farthest. It also has introduced me to modules that I wouldn’t have otherwise found (some are still in dev but very cool nonetheless) and which I feel are worth pointing out to people who may have only begun to scratch the surface with Drupal.

• FlexiField
• Conditional Fields
• CCK Fieldgroup Tabs
• Automatic Nodetitles
• Token
• Rules
• Workflow
• ImageCache
• Imagecache Actions
• Contemplate

I’m a little OCD about modules and I’ve delicious’d a ton that are of interest beside these.

My favorites from above? Contemplate, which makes it way easier to customize the look and feel of your nodes’ teaser and body without having to add specific template file to your theme. Token is pretty much indespensible as well if you want to take a value and insert it into somewhere else. It can be used to customize forms for the person logged in or with Automatic Nodetitle to use a field such as the filename of a file uploaded as the node’s title. Workflow and Rules help to control what happens (field updated, email sent) when nodes move from one state to another and establish those states (for example: Approved, Submitted, Review). Flexifield and Conditional Field help make CCK smarter and ImageCache and Imagecache Actions make mass image (jpg, gif, png) manipulation simpler.

Working with Drupal I’m truly amazed sometimes with what is possible with it. Everytime I work with it I get new ideas about how I might use it.