Every month more than 100 new contributed modules are added to drupal. Sorting through these with my church and ministry goggles on I've found a few that could prove to be fairly useful for churches and ministries.
Imagecache Actions
The new release of the imagecache module lets us do image manipulations on the images we upload right on the server. The new setup allows the image manipulations to go beyond just cropping and resizing. Imagecache Actions takes advantage of these new hooks and provides features like rotating images, adding water marks, and more. Server side image manipulation just went up a notch.
Simplenews on Register
Simplenews is a newsletter module for a site. It creates newsletters, handles mailing lists, and even provides sidebar blocks to subscribe and unsubscribe from lists. And, since this module is used to manage the drupal.org mail lists there will be a path forward for it. But, it doesn't provide the ability to register for newsletters when a new user signs up for an account. Simplenews on Register takes care of this problem.
HTMLBox
HTMLBox is a WYSIWYG editor built on jQuery. The HTMLBox module brings this WYSIWYG editor to drupal. You can see it in action over at NowPublic.com. They switched from TinyMCE to HTMLBox recently so they are quite familiar with these editors.
Modules To Keep An Eye On
There are a number of modules that aren't quite ready to go but are worth keeping an eye on because they have great potential.
Mobile Theme
The web and web applications are going mobile. Gone are the days of simple text browsers in mobile phones. But, with the onset of full featured browsers in mobile phones (think iPhone and Android) we need to deal with that small screen size. That's where the Moblie Theme module will work. It will deal with browser detection and switch to a mobile friendly theme if the browser is a mobile phone.
SimpleView
The views user interface can be quite daunting. It's has an incredible capability to do extermely advanced things. But, sometimes you want to create a simple view with basic and common options. That's where Simpleview comes it. It's a simple UI to create simple views.
Bible Plans
This is a specific one for churches and ministries. It brings bible reading plans to drupal. Check out the bible plans module homepage for details.
exciting
wow, this is exciting. There are so many modules that it is getting difficult to manage sometimes as to what to use. Any word on views2 for Drupal 6. I can't go to v6 unless CCk and Views is ported.
The mobile theme module looks interesting... I strongly believe that in several years from now, our 'main' theme build will be for phones and portable devices. My wife bought an iPhone several months ago and she doesn't use a computer anymore. I suspect this may be the case for many people as well soon. What do you think?
Soon
I expect Views 2 and CCK to come out soon. From what I understand there are just a few bugs left they are hunting down and it will require drupal 6.3, i think. So, expect that soon.
Drupal on Mobile
Hi,
I’ve recently started a blog, mobiledrupal.com, which all about making and testing mobile websites with Drupal. I’ve also added a section which summarises mobile modules available for Drupal, which I hope people will find helpul.
Please have a look and get in touch with any comments!
Tom