Five Easy Drupal Usability Modules

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no usability expert, but I do know pretty quickly when a feature on a site is hard, tedious or confusing. In that same vein I’m a sucker for when things make my life easier! I can do the same amount of work in less time to get to doing the things I enjoy; which is why I love these five easy Drupal usability modules. Setup on all of them is a snap and when you’re done you’ll actually have more free time, and we all need more of that.

1. Administration Menu

   Honestly, if you’re not familiar with the admin menu module then you probably built your site in WordPress or Joomla. When it comes to making the administration of your website easier this is as-good-as-it-gets. One click access to the entire site administration tree and it can even be customized. No more swapping between front end and backend navigation to complete your updates and tweaks. You can hit them all from anywhere with this icon of usability. There's one drawback - it utilizes javascript and on occasion can slow down your page speed; outside of that it’s truly remarkable.

2. Automatic Nodetitles

   In my opinion this module is the model of uniformity; sure it’s simple and the name says exactly what it does but that doesn’t mean that it’s any less of a usability gem. Using site wide tokens or CCK tokens, you can automatically generate the title of your nodes. It works great for things like sporting events where there are two teams involved, a date, a time and a location. Simply add those needed CCK field and then maybe you have all your titles read: [field_team1_name] vs [field_team2_name] at [field_location] on [field_date] at [field_time]. Generating a title similar to Red vs Blue at Wrigley Field on Friday, July 12th at 6:00PM.

3. Login Toboggan

   I love Drupal; I hate Access Denied! I’m sure you get that all the time where you can’t access a page based upon your permission level, but instead of a Login or Registration area you simply hit Access Denied. Login Toboggan allows you to add the registration to the 403 page and give you options for redirecting users to specific pages upon login. Let’s be honest no one wants to login to leave a comment only to have the site redirect them to the homepage, usability fail.

4. String Overrides

   Got a membership site? Ever wish there was an easy way to replace site wide the extensive reference to users with the word member? Then the String Overrides module is for you; it’s simple to use and can replace just about anything that’s passed through the t() function. All you have to do is type the word or phrase you want to replace with your new word or phrase and String Overrides does the rest.

5. ModuleInfo

   Have you ever installed a new module only to have a hard time actually finding the settings page for that module? Well ModuleInfo takes most of what you find on the admin/by-module page and adds that data back to the module installation page. In addition you also get a rundown of all the adjustments that the module makes upon installation so that you’re not left in the dark as to what the new module does. This module simply needs to be installed and turned on to function and I guarantee that you’ll immediately enjoy having that information handy.