Drupal Modules For Blogging - How to make a Drupal Blog with images and control spam

Sat, 05/31/2008 - 06:09 — funk

The most used, and easiest CMS for blogging is Wordpress. But, as you can see on this site, Drupal does it as well. Here is a list of modules I tried and I'm using for blogging.

Before you start

There is a drupal blog-module. But, you won"t use this normally. What it does is, it enables a blogging feature for communities. Every user has the ability to create a blog on the Drupal site. When you want to use your Drupal site, just for 1 single blog, it's better to use the content type, story or page. This is a little confusing for new users. So, a basic Druapl installation is already a blog on itself. But you can pimp it with the following modules.

CORE

Ping

This module, which is included in a basic installation, will notify search engines that your blog has been updated, so that they can crawl it again.

http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/ping

XML sitemap

Creates a xml sitemap which can be customized. I tried a lot of different sitemap modules, but I like this one the most. It just works TM.

http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap

adsense

The google Adsense module. It creates blocks for adsense ads, which can be customised. One of the features is that it dispalys hit information on the admin pages, but I never got that to work. Nevertheless it's usefull if you use Adsense.

http://drupal.org/project/adsense

comment notify

Enables the notification of replies to posters of content and comments

http://drupal.org/project/comment_notify

search engine referers

This module displays a list of links with the queries that link to your site. I use this a lot! Very Usefull in my opinion

http://drupal.org/project/search_engine_referers

Teleport

This one is very nice for admins! You can asign a key binding to this module that will trigger a javascript pop-up. Here you can start typing the name of a page, be it content or from the admin panel, it will autocomplete, again with javascript, and direct you to the selected page. This way you don't have to click on 5 links to go from one page to another. A++

http://drupal.org/project/teleport

SPAM control

spam

The spam module provides numerous tools to auto-detect and deal with spam content that is posted to your site. Spam can be automatically unpublished and/or deleted.

http://drupal.org/project/spam

comment mail

The Comment Mail module allows an email to be sent to the site administrator(s) when new comments are posted. A link in the email allows quick approval, editing, deletion, and/or banning of the poster's IP address. Very usefull!

http://drupal.org/project/commentmail

akismet

This is a module which identifies and blocks comments and trackbacks spam on blogs. Very usefull I you have a spam problem like me.

http://drupal.org/project/akismet

NO MORE SPAM PROBLEMS with these 3 modules

Images

image

the core image module. It lets you display images. It's a requiered dependency for other image related modules, like to following 2. Still Alpha alas, but it has a great future

http://drupal.org/project/image

image gallery

It isn't easy to find a good image gallery module for drupal (probably because the image module is still aplha), but this is what this one does. It Add a image gallery to your Drupal site. Only thing it lacks are pagers (the 'previous' and 'next' links, beneath the images. Here is a tutorial to add those

Lightbox2

This is a nice javascript image viewing module. Try it out in my image gallery

http://drupal.org/project/lightbox2

Picasa

Displays a page where you can see all the public Picasa webalbums. When you click on one, you will be redirected to the album, on picasa. I don't use it anymore, because of the embed webalmus function of Picasa. But it can be handy for picasa users. There is also a Flickr module, but I haven't tried that one out yet

http://drupal.org/project/picasa
http://drupal.org/project/flickrmodule