A module further enhances the functionality of Drupal. Besides writing your own custom module, there are more than 30000 contributed modules available from the generous Drupal community. It’s a set of PHP, JavaScript and CSS files that extends site’s features and adds desired functionality. Drupal comes with its own set of core modules as well which provides the functionalities such as, managing user accounts, basic contents and fields, site navigation. In Drupal 8 the famous Views module is now included in the core which helps in making lists, grids, blocks from existing contents.
Following are some of the few must have contributed modules in Drupal 8:
Admin Toolbar
Drupal 7’s Admin Menu module wasn’t perfect. While it did enable dropdown menus to provide fast access to admin pages, the menus were teeny tiny and didn’t work on mobile devices. Thankfully, this module has since been improved—and renamed!
The Admin Toolbar module still transforms the admin menu into a drop-down menu, but with an updated look and feel that’s mobile friendly. This module also comes with a sub-module called “Admin Toolbar Extra Tools” that adds extra menu items for flushing caches, running cron, etc.
Chaos Tool Suite
CTools, as it’s more commonly referred to, is a set of APIs and tools designed to improve the developer experience. It includes things like plugins, exportables, AJAX responder, form tools, object caching, contexts, modal dialog, dependent, content, form wizard, and CSS tools.
This handy module also comes with a Page Manager Module that makes it easy to manage panel pages (and in the future, more than just panels).
Devel
Devel is actually a grab-bag of modules with useful features for developers and themers. Its submodules include:
• WebProfiler - a powerful footer that shows resource utilization, cache effectiveness, database queries, and more
• Kint - a debugging tool that presents your debugging data in a pretty, nicely formatted way
• Devel Generate - fills your test site with realistic dummy users, nodes, images, taxonomy, etc.
• Devel Node Access - displays information related to the node access mechanism of your Drupal installation
Google Analytics
Whether you’re running a small business or a corporation, Google Analytics is the gold standard for web statistics tracking. Without it, your marketing team won’t know who’s visiting your site, what they’re looking for, what pages they’re visiting, or how they got there in the first place.
The Google Analytics module adds its world-class tracking system to your website. You can access a customized set of statistics right from the Drupal interface and gain a deeper understanding of user behavior and website performance.
Media Entity
This little gem is brand-new to Drupal 8, and it’s a prime example of Drupal 8’s turn to a more component-based system
What the Media Entity module does is create a relationship between Drupal and a media resource. In other words, it transforms a YouTube video, tweet, Instagram photo, local file, or other media resource into an Entity. The resulting Entities are reusable, easy to maintain, easy to manipulate, and contain valuable metadata.
Metatag
This handy SEO module has nearly 2 million downloads, and with good reason. It automatically provides structured metatags with full multilingual and internationalization support, which means different meta tags are loaded depending on the browser language. The Metatag module also gives the option to create custom metatags, and gives users control of how content appears when shared on social networks.
Pathauto
The Pathauto module automatically creates URL aliases for nodes, taxonomy, terms, and users, eliminating the need to create them manually (in other words, no more /node/123). The URL aliases are created from a custom token system that you can change as you please.
Token
The Token module provides additional tokens not supported by core (most notably fields), as well as a UI for browsing tokens.
Tokens are essentially short bits of text that act as placeholders. For a simple example, tokens placed into emails sent from your site could automatically insert a user’s name. Or, you could use a token to insert the current date. On a grander scale, Token can work with other modules to complete more complex tasks, such as automatically generating URL/path aliases for various kinds of content.
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