The Best Drupal 8 Modules

The Best Drupal 8 Modules

It’s been a few years since Drupal 8 was released to the world, and it’s safe to say the Drupal community has officially settled into the new features and improvements. Instead of spending their time getting to know the inner workings of Drupal 8, they can instead focus their energy on enhancing its functionality and utilizing the best Drupal 8 modules.

That means Drupal developers have been busy porting modules from previous releases, creating new ones, and improving stability and user-friendliness all around. But with over 2400 Drupal 8 modules to choose from, how do you know which ones are best for your project?

Well, first of all, many popular modules were ported from Drupal 7 and now exist in Drupal 8’s core: views, wysiwyg, date, email, link, and phone, just to name a few.

And beyond that, don’t worrywe have you covered. Without further ado, here are 8 must-have modules that will add power and flexibility to each and every Drupal site, no matter the size. 

Best Drupal 8 Modules

Chaos Tool Suite

CTools, as it’s more commonly referred to, is a set of APIs and tools designed to improve the developer experience. It includes things like plugins, exportables, AJAX responder, form tools, object caching, contexts, modal dialog, dependent, content, form wizard, and CSS tools.

This handy module also comes with a Page Manager Module that makes it easy to manage panel pages (and in the future, more than just panels).

Token

The Token module provides additional tokens not supported by core (most notably fields), as well as a UI for browsing tokens.

Tokens are essentially short bits of text that act as placeholders. For a simple example, tokens placed into emails sent from your site could automatically insert a user’s name. Or, you could use a token to insert the current date. On a grander scale, Token can work with other modules to complete more complex tasks, such as automatically generating URL/path aliases for various kinds of content (requires the Pathauto module, which we’ll discuss next).

Pathauto

The Pathauto module automatically creates URL aliases for nodes, taxonomy, terms, and users, eliminating the need to create them manually (in other words, no more /node/123). The URL aliases are created from a custom token system that you can change as you please.

Google Analytics

Whether you’re running a small business or a corporation, Google Analytics is the gold standard for web statistics tracking. Without it, your marketing team won’t know who’s visiting your site, what they’re looking for, what pages they’re visiting, or how they got there in the first place.

The Google Analytics module adds its world-class tracking system to your website. You can access a customized set of statistics right from the Drupal interface and gain a deeper understanding of user behaviour and website performance.

Admin Toolbar

Drupal 7’s Admin Menu module wasn’t perfect. While it did enable dropdown menus to provide fast access to admin pages, the menus were teeny tiny and didn’t work on mobile devices. Thankfully, this module has since been improvedand renamed!

The Admin Toolbar module still transforms the admin menu into a drop-down menu, but with an updated look and feel that’s mobile friendly. This module also comes with a submodule called Admin Toolbar Extra Tools that adds extra menu items for flushing caches, running cron, etc.

Media Entity

This little gem is brand-new to Drupal 8, and it’s a prime example of Drupal 8’s turn to a more component-based system.

What the Media Entity module does is create a relationship between Drupal and a media resource. In other words, it transforms a YouTube video, tweet, Instagram photo, local file, or other media resource into an Entity. The resulting Entities are reusable, easy to maintain, easy to manipulate, and contain valuable metadata.

Devel

Devel is actually a grab-bag of modules with useful features for developers and themers. Its submodules include:

•    WebProfiler – a powerful footer that shows resource utilization, cache effectiveness, database queries, and more
•    Kint – a debugging tool that presents your debugging data in a pretty, nicely formatted way
•    Devel Generate – fills your test site with realistic dummy users, nodes, images, taxonomy, etc.
•    Devel Node Access  – displays information related to the node access mechanism of your Drupal installation

Metatag

This handy SEO module has nearly 2 million downloads, and with good reason. It automatically provides structured metatags with full multilingual and internationalization support, which means different meta tags are loaded depending on the browser language. The Metatag module also gives the option to create custom metatags, and gives users control of how content appears when shared on social networks.

Want to know any modules that could help your business website?

Or, are you a developer having trouble installing any of these modules?

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