Drupal has been used extensively throughout the world to build almost everything – from personal blogs to enterprise applications – and everything in between. Thousands of add-ons and modules offered by Drupal lets you build any site that you can imagine. Being an open source content management system which is free and ever-growing (all thanks to its huge community); Drupal is just the perfect platform for any kind of business.
Millions of websites and applications have been made by offshore Drupal development firms using Drupal. These include some of the websites from top brands getting maximum visitors each day. The platform has to be very robust, easily maintainable and user-friendly to achieve such feat.
Plug-ins plays a pivotal role in the success story of Drupal. There are uncountable numbers of plug-ins for Drupal and hundreds are being developed every day. Following are the 5 plug-ins that you must add to your Drupal website so as to make it stand-out in the crowd.
1. Views
It presents you with an option to sort the lists and tables of the content (only nodes in Views 1 and almost anything in Views 2). The Drupal programmers would love the flexibility it presents. Traditionally, one had to hardcode the formatting of taxonomy and tracker lists. Imagine the amount of hard-work you will have to do in order to change the looks of the website traditionally.
When given enough information, this tool can build a proper query, execute it and display the result efficiently. You can generate reports, create summaries, and display collection of images with Views.
2. Token
Tokens are tiny bits of text that can be placed into larger documents using simple placeholders like %site-name or [user].
Though it is interesting to note that Token module on its own doesn’t provide any functions that are visible to the user. It just provides a central API for modules to use these tokens and find/create their own token values.
3. Pathauto
The Pathauto generates path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, categories, users) module automatically. And does not require the user to manually specify the path alias. The aliases thus generated are based upon a “pattern” which can be controlled by administrator.
4. ImageCache
ImageCache helps you to setup presets needed for processing images. The ImageCache derivative is equally important. Without it the web server has to re-write rules and then passes the request to Drupal which then hands it over to ImageCache to generate the file dynamically.
5. Google_Analytics
It adds the Google Analytics web statistics which track a system to desired website. It has various features which includes and are not limited to single/multi/cross domain tracking, selectively tracking/excluding certain users, roles and/or pages, and monitor the type of links that tracked.
There are various other plug-ins that are very useful and can be used in a website so as to optimize its performance. The key is to always use them as you require and not to bejewel your website with all of them.
