7 Great Drupal Modules for Content Control and Presentation

One thing that fuels the power of Drupal is all the small focused modules that exists. These modules are absolutely lovely to work with. Not only do they almost always solve the task they are developed for perfectly, but also because they add very little, if any, complexity to your projects.

This time I have taken a look at contributed modules that improves your control over input and presentation of content. Many of these modules are also great for better SEO of your website.

In the list below you will find seven modules I use frequently for the projects I am involved in. The list is based on Drupal 6 modules, but I have also researched the status for Drupal 7 for each of them.

Note: The information about each module below is not a complete feature list. I have focused on those features I use the most.

1 - Better Formats

The Better Formats module gives you much better control of the Drupal core input system. You can quickly configure default settings for the whole website, as well as individual content types. The configuration allows you to restrict which input filters are available, as well as which roles will be able to use them.

The module also gives you much better control over how the help texts are presented for each input filter or hide them completely.

Drupal 7 Status

The improved features in Drupal 7 replaces many of what this modules has to offer. Therefor the maintainer has postponed any port of it until the code freeze is over. More information can be found in this issue ticket.

Personally I hope it will be ported. Especially the features that gives you better control of the help texts would be very handy to have.

2 - External Links

The External Links module is the one that adds the small icon to the right of all the external links you find here on Nutshell. It also does the same for mailto links, adding a small envelope icon to them.

It also allows you to configure so that every external link opens in a new window or tab when clicked on.

Drupal 7 Status

Has the #D7CX pledge and is already ported to Drupal 7. Works very well as you can see here on Nutshell.

3 - Maxlength

The Maxlength module lets you control the maximum number of character that can be typed into a text field or text area. Optionally it can also present a counter that dynamically tells you the number of remaining characters.

A little annoyance is that the counter take up valuable space below the help text for the text field or text area. That also makes it a little difficult to find in some forms. An option to place it above to the right of the text field or textarea, see my suggestion in this issue ticket, would be nice if it had.

For SEO it can help improving your page titles. Google any many other search engines only show about 65 characters of the title in their SERPs. By limiting the title to for example 45 characters, you will force your writers to come up with better titles.

Drupal 7 Status

Status unknown right now. Hopefully it will be ported as it is very useful.

4 - Page Title

The Page Title module focuses on giving you granular control of the <title> tag. Using Tokens it gives you great flexibility of the output.

You can create global patterns for the whole site, individual patterns for content types as well as individual nodes. It also let you create patterns for user pages and blog pages among other things.

For SEO this module is important. By utilising good patterns your pages will get higher ranking. Its one of the modules the SEO Checklist module suggest you to use.

Drupal 7 Status

Drupal 7 port exists. I did try it for alpha 5, but it caused a fatal error. A new alpha of it was released just two days ago. I haven't tested it yet, but the fatal error I got previously is now marked as fixed. I will update this information as soon as I have had a chance to test it again.

5 - Scheduler

The Scheduler module gives you the possibility to schedule a date and time to automatically make a node published. Integrates well with the Date Popup feature provided by the Date module.

A very versatile module that makes it easy to automate publishing of any node. Thus avoiding having to manually go in and do it.

Drupal 7 Status

Some work on porting it to Drupal 7 has begun, but no dev version is available yet. See this issue ticket for more information.

6 - Submitted by

The Submitted by module lets you control the submitted by output on nodes where that is presented. It provides a nice UI for this so you don't need to do it in, for example, your theme. It depends on the Token module, thus offering you great flexibility.

Drupal 7 Status

A port have begun, but it is from the 10th of October, 2009. I haven't tested it yet so can't say anything about how it works. You can find the dev version here.

7 - Unique field

The Unique field module let you define rules for fields in your content types to avoid duplicates. You have many options such as per language, per author and so on.

This is especially useful for avoiding that duplicated content is created. For SEO it can also prevent the creating of pages with the same titles, which in many cases would have a negative impact.

Drupal 7 Status

A dev version exists for Drupal 7. However it is from January 21, not July 11 as it says on the project page. There are no issues for it though. I haven't tested it yet, so I can't promise that it works.

And that concludes my list of seven useful modules for content control and presentation.

I hope you found it useful.