With the “Oscars” of the Drupal community (aka the International Splash Awards) ending today, I could not help reviewing (once again) some of the best Drupal modules of the year.
There are 4 of them, listed as nominees in their own category.
And it makes no difference which team has won the trophy, for the 4 “contestants” are all equal winners. After all, each one of these valuable projects comes to address a pressing, frequently-signaled issue affecting the experience of working with/using Drupal.
Now, let's look over these 4 best Drupal modules of 2019 and highlight the core problems they solve and the innovative features that they ship with in order to:
- give Drupal a big push forward
- make our experiences — as both Drupal end users and Drupal developers — a lot more enjoyable
1. Paragraphs Editor Enhancements
Why was there any need for enhancements to the Paragraphs module? I mean, it was already one of the “rockstar” Drupal modules, which enabled us to easily:
- structure our content: we would just pick out content elements, filled them in with content and have them displayed in an already pre-defined structure
- reuse the recurring content architectures
What was the issue affecting the editorial process that this module, one of the best Drupal projects of the year, came to address?
Well, there were a couple of them, actually.
First of all, the whole matter of dragging and dropping the content elements and positioning them inside the structure was getting quite... tedious. What if we could just insert them right in the due spots?
The then available solution for this inconvenience has been Paragraphs Features, which would add a button in-between every content element. Once clicked on, it would pop up the model dialog storing the content elements collection to scan through.
And yet, in most cases, editors would choose the same elements for a specific content type. So, what if they could insert them preferentially and skip digging through the model dialog?
Also, there was the “buttons' issue”, too: way too many buttons for further adding elements to every single content element... What if they were hidden buttons instead? Visible only as you'd move your mouse over those content elements?
Maybe just 2 of them, corresponding to the key content elements, could remain fully visible, while the rest... only when hovered over.
And last, another frequently signaled “sore point” was the dialog itself, overburdened with content elements. There are so many crammed in there that... it can get confusing.
What if it had a more editor-friendly design, where we could easily filter through the list of elements and quickly track down the ones we're looking for?
We'd just use the "target" content element's description and title to find it.
And what if we could define categories for our content elements and have one or more of them for the same element?
Well, luckily enough, all these "what if" questions in relation to the Paragraphs module, got their answers in the Paragraphs Editor Enhancements module. One of the best Drupal modules of the year...
And no wonder why...
Note: the same team has gone even further with its contribution to the Drupal community and came up with Paragraphs Sets, as well. It enables you to create groups of all those specific elements that you use systematically.
This way, you can just add your pre-defined set of paragraphs to your content and jump straight to... filling them in with content.
2. Drupal Gutenberg, One of the Best Drupal Modules of the Year
Defined as “a solution that combines Drupal's sophisticated technology with an easy-to-use interface”, the Gutenberg module revolutionizes how we put together content in Drupal.
It comes to replace the old ways of customizing our Drupal projects, that often lacked consistency, with a “blocks' way” of creating content.
What are "blocks" in this context? Take them as unified ways of styling your content: with post formats, embeds, shortcodes and a whole lot of other formatting options.
And all that without the need to write even one single line of code.
And that's one of the key reasons why this module stands out as one of the best Drupal modules of 2019: creating/styling content in Drupal gets a lot easier. Accessible to all editors, regardless of their technical skills.
Much easier and, implicitly, much more intuitive: it turns into a matter of scanning through the Gutenberg Cloud library of contrib blocks, choosing the ones you need for your specific screen and editing/styling them to your liking.
You even get to reuse your blocks and scale them to suit your needs and preferences.
3. JSON:API
It was only but... predictable to find the JSON:API listed among the best Drupal projects of the year.
After all, the Lullabot team's contribution to Drupal has been vital: their module generates an API server responsible for implementing the JSON:API specification.
JSON:API specification which is, in fact, a set shared conventions on how a client should request resources to be retrieved or modified and how your API server should handle them.
Now, what the JSON:API module does is reduce the requests and the data handled between clients and servers without trading flexibility, readability or discoverability for this level of efficiency.
It can even remove network requests completely...
And here's the module "in action":
Once enabled, you get a full REST API for every type in your app. The module analyzes each entity type and gets them all bundled together in order to generate URLs linking to them all.
For that, conventional HTTP methods, Patch, Get, Post Delete are being used.
But the real "power" of this module is the "ready to use" principle that it follows: it's highly opinionated about the available methods, about where the resources can be found.
Moreover, it grants the Drupal Core's permission system with access control. And where do you add that there are no configuration pages...
Building a perfectly functional API-driven Drupal app turns into a conveniently streamlined process.
4. Salesforce Suite
Salesforce Suite has been another "not at all surprising" nominee in the best Drupal modules category.
What this bundle of modules does is synchronize Drupal entities (files, users, nodes, etc.) with Salesforce objects (organizations, contact, opportunities).
Drupal data can get pushed/pulled to Salesforce and Salesforce data can get imported to Drupal. In short, Salesforce gets perfectly integrated into Drupal.
And now, here are some of the most powerful features that Salesforce Suite for Drupal 8's ships with:
- objectification of Salesforce resources
- queue on Failure
- mapping UI overhaul
- queue Settings per Mapping
- push queue overhaul (based on DatabaseQueue), and cron-based push
- robust unit and functional test coverage
- cron-based pull
- real-time push, and entity-based push/pull form
The END!
Quite curious now: what's your own preference from this list of 4 best Drupal modules of the year?
Which project has had the greatest impact on your work as a Drupal developer/editor working with Drupal?