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5 Must Have Drupal SEO Modules
Drupal
5 Must Have Modules for Drupal SEO

I have been doing Drupal development for the last four years. During that time, one concern from potential clients has been that Drupal isn’t SEO friendly. While Drupal may not come ready for search engine optimization out of the box, with a few additional modules and some proper configuration, Drupal can be a successful SEO platform. Below are what I consider must have modules for Drupal SEO.

1. Pathauto
Pathauto works by creating automatic URL aliases based upon tokens that you set in the configuration. By default, Drupal’s URL structure looks similar to “/node/75” where 75 is the node id of the page. With Pathauto, your urls will transform into keyword rich URLS such as “blog/five-must-have-modules-drupal-search-engine-optimization”. Each URL pattern can be configured on a per-content type basis, and you can add alias patterns for your taxonomies as well as your users.

2. Global Redirect
The Global Redirect module works by automatically redirecting visitors from the node/xx URL to the aliased version of the URL. This is important as it prevents duplicate content penalties within Drupal. This module also allows you to add a canonical tag to your pages as well.

3. MetaTag
The Metatag module allows you the option of configuring metatags for your site at both the individual and global level. As of the time of this writing, the Metatag module has support for the following tags:

4. XML SiteMap
The XML SiteMap module create sitemaps that you can use to submit to Google, Bing and Yahoo’s Webmaster tools. You can indicate which content types you’d like to see included and indicate the priority of those content type pages on your site. The benefit of submitting an XML Sitemap is so that the search engines know about all of the pages on your site. Without it, they will only know about the pages found during their normal crawling process which sometimes misses pages.

5. SEO Checklist
The SEO Checklist module doesn’t add any functionality to your site directly, but it does serve as a reminder for SEO related tasks that still need to be completed. It separates items by category and allows you to check off items as they are completed. SEO checklist also saves a timestamp of each completed action so that other site administrators will know when items are completed. This module is updated frequently with the latest SEO techniques and helps ensure that you are maximizing SEO for your site.

LightSky recommends Drupal as a solution too many of our clients who want easy to use and maintain websites that are also flexible and secure. One of the great features of Drupal is that it is so easy to customize. Adding the above modules for SEO is an example of how Drupal can easily be adapted for our clients’ needs. What are some of your favorite modules for SEO in Drupal?

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by michaelhodgejr
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NavBar in Drupal
Drupal
NavBar – The Next Step in Drupal Navigation

So I am not kidding NavBar is literally the next step in Drupal navigation, it is being used in core for Drupal 8.  This is great news because not only does it mean that the Drupal 8 core will contain some much needed improvements to the administration navigation scheme.  Back end user improvements like this are perhaps the thing that makes me most excited about what Drupal 8 is bringing to the table.  Lets look a little bit at NavBar.

What You Get

Drupal's Navbar ModulePretty simply put NavBar gets you a responsive administration toolbar for your Drupal users.  It really isn’t going to do anything for what your visitors see, but your content creators, site administrators, and even site builders will see this as a much welcomed change.  NavBar is first and foremost completely responsive, and for those of you who use the traditional Drupal administration toolbar on your mobile phone oh boy are you excited.  The standard Drupal 7 install, not to mention Drupal 6, doesn’t offer the most mobile friendly administrative experience.  NavBar helps resolve this.  NavBar also offers a more flexible navigation option.  You are able to use NavBar at the top of your site above the header, or as a sidebar on the left hand side.  The customization of the tool, really helps set it apart.

Not only is the mobile experience improved, but there is a much cleaner and professional looking image presented than the Drupal 7 administration menu.  Though this might not seem like much, for those of us who build Drupal sites for clients this is a big deal.  Image is everything, and it is tough to sell Drupal’s out of the box usability against WordPresses out of the box usability.  We have a lot of admin usability improvements in our standard Drupal installation to help combat this, but now NavBar is another one.  Users almost expect clean and friendly design, and now they can get it.

Installation

I am not going to lie, NavBar in its current state is a bit of installation work, but most people should be able to figure it out if they have a little understanding for how Drupal is structured.

The first step for me is downloading and installing the project. I think that drush is the best tool for installing and enabling projects like this, but particularly for NavBar I suggest installing the project before moving to some of the other steps.  The reason is that once the project is installed and enabled it will put some indicators on your /admin/reports/status page that can really help you troubleshoot in the next steps.

Once the NavBar module is enabled, you can visit the site’s status report using the path above and notice that there are a three statuses now associated with NavBar, and this is where the fun comes in.  NavBar requires the installation of three libraries (Modernizr, Backbone, and Underscore), and you may have them already installed, or at least some of them.  Using the status page at this point will help you find out if you have them already installed and ready to run, or whether you need to install them.
If you find that you need to install them, the process isn’t all that complicated, there are some helpful guides on the project page that will point you in the right direction.  Or give us a shout we would be happy to help.  Essentially it is a matter of downloading the libraries, or cloning their respective repositories, and moving them to your libraries folder in the Drupal installation.  The Modernizr library requires you to follow a link and download a specific minimized version of the library but there are specific instructions to follow on the project page to help guide you here, so I won’t reinvent the wheel here.  The instructions are pretty thorough, and relatively simple.

Once you have the libraries installed you can disable your regular administration toolbar and you are off and running.  If you follow those steps and still aren’t having any luck, the site status report is the best place to look.  Most likely it is an error with the libraries that were installed, and that report will point you to which library is causing trouble, and maybe even what the problem is.

We have fallen in love with NavBar, and it has started making a huge impact on our clients and how well they like using Drupal.  We highly suggest you use it.

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by michaelhodgejr
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Improving Drupal Usability
Drupal
14 Modules for Improving Drupal Usability

Often times, Drupal gets a bad rap for usability. That’s because out of the box Drupal isn’t very user friendly. As with everything Drupal, it requires a few contributed modules in order to really make it shine. Below are a list of fourteen modules that you can add to your Drupal site to increase its usability. Let’s begin!

Views Bulk Operations – VBO is a module that allows you to execute bulk actions on views rows. The actions it comes with are pretty standard, but you can extend it using the Rules module or even roll your own if that’s your thing. This module allows for your site admins to be able to do things like mass delete nodes, mass publish/unpublish nodes, or even mass change the nodes author.

Admin Views – Admin Views is a module that replaces the stock administration screens with views. Why is this neat? You can add additional exposed filters to your users administration screens, or change which columns appear in order to help your site admins easily find the information they are looking for.

Draggable Views – Draggable Views is a module that allows your rows in a view to be reordered using the same javascript implementation that you find scattered about the Drupal admin (blocks, menu, etc).

Module Filter – Module Filter is a module that seeks to garner control over the unwieldy module listing page. It does this by adding a tab on the left hand side for each package, as well as one for showing the modules alphabetically. It also adds a textbox that you can search to quickly filter the module listing.

Autocomplete Deluxe – The Autocomplete Deluxe module replaces the default autocomplete element with the jQuery UI version making it much more user friendly than the default implementation.

Pathologic – The Pathologic module is an input filter which fixes image and link paths that would otherwise cause them to break. This is useful in situations where your site admins have content on both staging and live sites. Gone are the days of the live site pointing to the test site by accident or vice versa.

Custom Contextual Links – Contextual links was one of the features that our D6 -> D7 clients really seemed to love. One great usability improvement that you can make is to add a contextual link to a view (for example) that would allow them to quickly add the piece of content that corresponds to that view. Normally you’d add these custom contextual links through a set of hooks, but this module provides a nice UI to make it simple.

Conditional Fields – The Conditional Fields module allows you to create fields that are dependent upon one another in order to be shown. One example of this would be to show a textarea of an admin (or user) selected “Other”. I added this module because it can be go a long way towards cleaning up administration screens when adding content types with lots of information.

Linkit – The Linkit module replaces the default CKEditor link icon with an autocomplete field that allows admins to easily drill down to the content they are looking to link to.

Edit – Drupal 8 will ship with inline editing, and if you are too excited to wait, check out the Edit module. Edit module allows you to do just that, edit content in place. Note that you’ll need to use the CKEditor WYSIWYG if you want this to work on WYSIWYG fields.

Select2 – Like the autocomplete deluxe module above, the Select2 module replaces the standard select box with one that supports searching, remote data sets and infinite scrolling of results.

References Dialog – The References Dialog replaces all the standard reference fields with a dialog that allows them to add, edit and search for references. This can go a long way towards simplifying the administration workflow.

Content Menu – The Content Menu module adds the ability for administrators to be able to create pieces of content straight from the menu administration pages. When creating a piece of content, you have the ability to add a menu item, so it only makes sense that you can add a piece a content when adding a menu item.

Navbar – The Navbar module adds a mobile friendly navigation bar to the administration section of your website replacing the default toolbar which is non-responsive.

There you go. Fourteen modules to improve the authoring experience of your Drupal site. What do you think of the list? Are there any modules you would like to see added? Feel free to discuss in the comments below.

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by michaelhodgejr
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