Following our article 16 of the best Drupal 7 Modules, here is an up-to-the minute list of the best Drupal 8 modules. These are the ones we know will be vital on nearly any web design and development project.
Best Modules for Drupal 8
- Admin Toolbar
Replacing our old favourite 'admin menu' this module along with the Adminimal theme and the 'adminimal toolbar' module are a pleasure to work with. Nice to see Drupal continuing to mature in this way.
- Advagg
OK, 'Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation' - but in my head it's always advagg. A real help with page load speeds - along with Big Pipe which is now part of core - means that even complex Drupal 8 web pages can load in under half a second. Blazingly fast!
- Auto Height
Not glamorous or sexy, but very helpful in conjunction with bootstrap grid layouts. Simple to use and very effective, installed on all our Drupal 8 sites by default.
- Backup & Migrate
Not quite as polished as the Drupal 7 version, but a real workhorse. Now we have an SSD installed in our office development server we can roll back data quickly and easily - a vital function for web development.
- Background Images Formatter
In conjunction with the responsive image module - part of core in Drupal 8 - this allows responsive, content-managed background images. Fantastic - and a great step forwards for Drupal 8.
- Display Suite
Drupal theming in Drupal 8 has improved and or changed depending on how you look at it with the new twig system. I like it but I do find I am increasingly using Display Suite to handle content type layouts. It's very flexible, easy to use and since about Drupal 8.3 it actually works!
- Flickity
Drupal 7 carousels were always a bit of a pain, Drupal 8 has a new module to use the Flickity touch responsive gallery system. Modern, lightweight, fast to load and simple to configure. Got to be in my best Drupal 8 modules.
- Focal Point
Also available for Drupal 7 this module solves the problem of image crops losing the key part of the image by easily allowing end users to select the main point of interest in an image.
- Masquerade
As websites get more complex and user permissions ever more granular, figuring out what a particular user is seeing becomes more and more important. That's why we always include the masquerade module in any of our projects - even a simple company brochure website can benefit from this.
- Metatag
If you want your site to be found you will need metatag. Search engine optimisation, Google ranking, Internet marketing, whatever you call it, you need this Drupal 8 module.
- Rabbit Hole
By the same token, when you don't want Google to find content - users, content displayed by views etc - rabbit holes hides them out of the way of prying eyes.
- RRSSB
Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons - a really nice lightweight way of adding social share buttons to any page.
- Responsive Menus
Uses the mmenu jQuery plugin for a very effective solution to this problem. Also works in conjunction with Superfish, another old favourite, for those occasions when Drupal doesn't fill in enough information to theme things correctly.
- Webform
And finally - webform. This module just gets better and better, I think it's a reason on it's own to use Drupal 8. Even if you just want a simple contact us form, I would recommend using this module for its power and level of control.
Are these the best Drupal 8 modules?
So that's it, do you think these are the best of the new batch? Are there any we've missed that you would include - any we've listed that you would take out? Let us know in the comments!