Have you decided to finally turbocharge your existing website with some of all that functionality and innovative features that Drupal 8's been so appraised for? Or maybe it's no migration/leveling up involved, but you're actually facing the challenge of building a brand new company website and you want to “charge” it with some of all that Drupal 8 power and flexibility that the whole community of Drupal developers is so excited about? Then you must be wondering which are the best Drupal 8 modules that you could select for your new or your “to be migrated” website!
Your question is more than legitimate, considering all those feature-rich Drupal 8 modules (and there are over 2000 of them!) that this latest version of Drupal is “seducing” you with.
And it will continue to get increasingly challenging to choose the very best, considering the fact that Drupal 8 is still a work-in progress. Its community is constantly:
- porting modules from previous versions of Drupal
- building brand new ones
- putting together their efforts for making it even more stable and user friendly
Before we go on sharing with you our own list of five best Drupal 8 modules, allow us to give you a good piece of news! It's, in fact, part of the whole boosted functionality and extra cool features “battle plan” that Drupal 8's developers have put together for this version of Drupal: many of the highly popular Drupal 7 modules not only that have been ported to Drupal 8, but they're now in its core!
And now, let's enlist and detail a bit the modules on Drupal 8's “walk of fame”:
Best Drupal 8 Modules to Turbocharge Your Website With
1. Admin Toolbar
Why was there a need for a “new” admin menu? What “flaws” of the original menu needed to be fixed in Drupal 8?
Well, in Drupal 7, even though the admin menu enabled adding drop-down menus, it lacked responsiveness. A mobile-friendly look was greatly needed! One aimed at fixing the “barely visible, hardly clickable on mobile devices” issue of the former drop-down menus.
And so: Drupal 8's Admin Toolbar was born!
It's a fully responsive version, with enhanced drop-down menus functionality, streamlining the admin's workflow: admins can now break the habit of constantly clicking-through in order to get to various sub-menus.
Thus, an easy to use back-end interface for all those user roles in charge with content editing, producing or moderating is now available in Drupal 8!
There's more! Admin Toolbar comes with a sub-module, as well: Admin Toolbar Extra Tools! This one empowers admins to extend their menus' functionality even further: they get to add extra links for running cron, for flushing cache etc.
Talking about Drupal “empowering the user”, right?
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is any website owner's “best buddy”. It “obediently” delivers you pretty much any type of reports and comprehensive charts you need for monitoring your visitors' behavior and your site's overall performance.
Still, this is no news for anyone running an online business, especially not for someone operating in the digital “arena” of 2017, right?
Now, what Drupal 8 does, though its Google Analytics module, is that it streamlines your whole data monitoring and interpreting process, since it enables you to analyze your statistics right from your Drupal interface!
This is the “real” news!
3. Token
We couldn't have possibly left out precisely one of Drupal's most popular modules, right?
There isn't one web developer in Toronto, site administrator or website owner who could imagine carrying out their daily tasks without relying on tokens. They're Drupal's ultimate efficiency-boosters!
Acting as placehoders designed for automatically completing the tasks you assign to them, they streamline anyone's work.
Here's probably the most “rudimentary' example for you: a basic token such as [site:name] will automatically insert your website's name!
Basically what the Token module does, is that it supplies those tokens that are not available in core, especially fields, and also an user interface for you to use for scanning through the available collection of tokens.
On a greater scale, this module, one of the very best Drupal 8 modules, can work together with other modules, such as Pathauto, for carrying out more complex tasks, too. Tasks such as providing URL patterns for your whole Drupal website!
4. Devel
Devel is not just another one of the modules on our top five best Drupal 8 modules list: it's a whole “bunch” of sub-modules, in fact. One more “tempting” than the other, both for developers and for Drupal themers.
Let's highlight some of the most popular ones:
- Devel Node Access: provides detailed information regarding the node access mechanism of your Drupal installation
- Kint: a debugging tool designed to display variables and backtraces in a nicely formatted, organize way, thus easing your overall understanding
- Web Profiler: adds a bottom toolbar presenting you all kinds of relevant stats, such as database queries, which services are being used, cache effectiveness etc.
- Devel Generate: creates dummy entities, thus populating your test site with images, taxonomy, dummy users etc.
5. Pathauto
What makes Pathauto one of the best Drupal 8 modules?
It's marks the end of and “era”, the “node/4803” types of links era, and the beginning of a new one! One of the automatically generated user-friendly, easy to remember types of links.
The ones that your users will be more familiar with and that search engine will find easier to discover, read and index, as well.
As for you, say “hello” to a higher ranking in SERP!
“How does it work?” you say?
What Pathauto does, in Drupal 8, is that it generates URL aliases automatically: no more manually created Drupal links from now on.
Moreover (and this is huge!), it enables you (or, better said, it “empowers” you) to change the custom token system generating the URL aliases as you wish!
And this is our list of top five best Module 8 modules! The modules that we rely on for setting up and managing various features of the web projects that we carry out here, in our web design company in Toronto!
Which are your own favorite ones?
