Site building

Table of Contents

• Views
• Features
• Date
• Webform
• link
• Views Slideshow
• Colorbox
• Entity reference
• Field Group
• Menu block
• Context
• Internationalization
• Strongarm
• Display Suite
• Menu attributes
• Superfish
• Metatag
• Field collection
• Block Class

Views

• Adequate machine names for your views and displays.
• View and displays names should talk about where and how they will be used.
• Write a little descriptions for view and displays.
• Content cache for Node, Time based cache for another entity types.
• Attach your views to features.
• Add CSS class to displays.

Features

• Export your configurations to code as much as possible.
• See the How to Organize Drupal Features, Reduce Merge Conflicts, and Stay Sane article for features organization guidelines.

Date

• Flexible date/time field type Date field.
• Date API that other modules can use.

Webform

• The module for making forms and surveys. Often used for misc contact forms.
• After a submission, users may be sent an e-mail "receipt" as well as sending a notification to administrators.
• Results can be exported into Excel or other spreadsheet applications.
• Also provides some basic statistical review and has an extensive API for expanding its features.
• Does not use Drupal 7 Fields and Entities, has its own API, implementations and integrations - so it may be more lightweight solution, but sometimes it creates limitations on extendability.

Link

• Field type for links.

Views Slideshow

• Can be used to create a slideshow of any content (not just images) that can appear in a View.
• Heavily customizable.
• Many contributes modules extend its functionality and provide more kinds of slideshow.

Colorbox

• Probides Colorbox - light-weight customizable lightbox plugin for jQuery - integration into Drupal.
• Images, iframed or inline content etc. can be displayed in a overlay above the current page.
• Most installed Drupal 7 lightbox module.
• There are many modules which support Colorbox or extend its functionality.
  ex. Colorbox node which provides an ability to display any page inside a colorbox modal without the header and footer.

Entity reference

• Provides a field type that can reference arbitrary entities.
• Create relations between entities (nodes, users and other). Similar References module is not recommended for use.

Field Group

• All fieldable entities will have the possibility to add groups to wrap their fields together.
• Comes with default HTML wrappers like vertical tabs, horizontal tabs, accordions, fieldsets or div wrappers.
• May be used on both entity forms and displays.
• Helps noticeable improve administrion UI, especially for entities with many fields.

Menu block

• Configurable blocks of menu trees starting with any level of any menu.
• And more!

Context

• Allows you to manage contextual conditions and reactions for different portions of your site.
• Think of conditions as a set of rules that are checked during page load to see what context is active. Any reactions that are associated with active contexts are then fired.
• Often used to manage blocks visibility depending on complex conditions when it's not possible to use core's blocks visibility.

Internationalization

• aka i18n.
• Collection of modules to extend Drupal core multilingual capabilities.
• Taxonomy translation (both, per language terms and translatable terms).
• Multilingual variables.
• Multilingual blocks (control visibility per language and translate title and content).
• Language selection (when you switch the site language you'll see only the content for that language).

Strongarm

• Gives site builders a way to override the default variable values that Drupal core and contributed modules ship with.
• Mostly used with the Features module to export Drupal variable values.

Display Suite

• Allows you to take full control over how your content is displayed using a drag and drop interface.
• Arrange your nodes, views, comments, user data etc.
• Dozens of template files.
• A predefined list of layouts.
• Possibility to add your own custom fields in the backend or in your code.
• Possibility to add custom layouts in your theme.
• Overrides layouts for rendered entities.
• Has own templates so theme's node.tpl.php and similar are not used when Display Suite layout is used.

Menu attributes

• Allows you to specify some additional attributes for menu items such as id, name, class, style, and rel.
• Very useful when some of menu items need for individual styling (for example, links to social networks).

Superfish

• Integrates jQuery Superfish plugin with your Drupal menus.
• Dropdown menus in blocks.

Metatag

• Allows you to automatically provide structured metadata, aka "meta tags", about a website.
• Description and keywords metadata.
• Open Graph support allow control of how content appears when shared on social networks (for example Facebook).
• And more.
• Most installed Drupal 7 module for metatags.

Field collection

• Provides a field-collection field, to which any number of fields can be attached.
• In other words it provides field type which is actually combination of several fields of any type.
• Internally represented as an entity, which is embedded in the host entity.
• Helpful in building complex fields, for example image with link.

Block Class

• Allows users to add classes to any block through the block's configuration interface.
• Must-have. Blocks should not be styled using IDs in CSS selectors - classes much more preferred.