Contributions
What are they & how to find them

Contributed or third party modules extend Drupal features without the need of altering any code.

It is possible to code new modules following the guidelines to achieve (almost) any feature needed.

There are thousands of contributed modules distributed under GPL license available in Drupal.org and other sources that can be used and adapt.

Contributed modules

The vast majority of the Drupal community is in drupal.org, that's the main source of modules and themes for extending your Drupal sites.

There are few exceptions, and very few non-free modules distributed.

A very useful resource is drupalmodules.com which is fed by drupal main repository and provides a friendlier interface for finding contributions.

Where to find contrib modules

Occasionally you will find modules that apparently look the same or cover the same needs.Usage stats: http://drupal.org/project/usage/views

Issue queues: http://drupal.org/project/issues/views?status=All&categories=All

Similar Module Review: http://groups.drupal.org/similar-module-review

How to choose contributed modules

Download from the official page.

Uncompress

Copy the directory in our application folder, for example sites/all/modules

Installing contributed modules

Access with a privileged user to the site, and go to the Modules page.

Select the module or modules to enable.

Save configuration.

Enabling contributed modules

Views provides a flexible and powerful interface to display information listings to the users.

Allows site builders to generate listings of content, users, image galleries, custom searches and many more without changing a single line of code.

601,638 sites can't be wrong

Main contributed modules
Views

Any kind of content listing, dynamic or static, of any kind of entity and might or might no need sorting and filtering capabilities.

Image galleries, carousels, slideshows, rotating banners...

Custom searches.

Content export in RSS, XML, JSON, etc.

Many more: maps, graphs, web services...

Views use cases

Generate listings easily without coding, black box effect.

Reuse of Views, completely or partially.

Out of the box full integration with fields, panels, and almost any other component.

Exposed filters.

Diferent display types for different content typologoies.

Documentation and support.

Why you should use Views

Projects in high demand of absolute contol of the data retrieved and code executed.

Query optimization.

Version control, auditory...

Hard to use

Reasons to NOT use Views

Views provides a complete API which facilitates an massive ecosystem of modules extending Views features such as extra display options, data structure modifications, etc.

Views Bonus, Views Tabs, Views Slideshow, Views Accordion, Views attach, Views Datasource, Views Popup

Views extensions

Rules provides a way for site builders to build actions and conditions to react on a given set of events.

Allows to configure and change business workflows with less effort.

Rules can be encapsulated and embedded so they could be reused by others.

Main contributed modules
Rules

Pathauto is used for generating semantic urls automatically. It uses replacement rules based in tokens.

Token provides the replacement chains for replacing path values but also to generate any kind of string based in system variables and many other context information such as fields, taxonomies...

Main contributed modules
Pathauto & Token

Entity Reference provides a way to relate entities (i.e. Users with Content) creating a bridge field to store the information.

It provides out of the box integration with Views, Rules and many more.

Other alternatives to relate content and entities are Relation or References.

Main contributed modules
Entity Reference

Panels enables the creation of page structures from the user inteface.

You can include a wide range of elements inside panels, such as views, fields, blocks...

Eases the design of pages with complex structures and allows building prototypes in a faster way.

Main contributed modules:
Panels

Drupal tends to be SEO friendly by default, but there are a number of modules that enhace and improve this capabilities:Xmlsitemap Provides a XML map for search engines.

MetaTags Allows to add meta tags to content.

Redirect Helps to create redirections from the interface

Main contributed modules
SEO

Drupal doesn't ship with a visual editor for content out of the box so every site must decide their preference (if any).WYSIWYG module provides a standard way to integrate a high number of editors.

Supported editors: CKEditor, FCKeditor, jWysiwyg, markItUp, NicEdit, openWYSIWYG, TinyMCE, Whizzywig, WYMeditor, YUI editor and many more.

Main contrib modules
WYSIWYG

Devel helps development

Internationalization Multilingual support

Flag 'flags' content

Backup and Migrate

MultimediaMedia

Embedded media field

Other contributed modules