Some tools to aid your Drupal admin pain

22. February 2012 - Ilari Mäkelä

I think we have all felt the pain at least sometimes when doing admin tasks on the Drupal backend. Trying to find your way to the right admin page without knowing the correct path, trying to find some module in the modules page and activate it etc. With the built-in basic tools it can be pretty frustrating. But worry no more because here I present you some cool modules to aid your admin pain!

Administration menu

Administration menu
Administration menu provides a theme-independent administration interface. This module is a real time saver for all types of users. You get fast access to all the sub admin pages through the CSS/JS-based dropdown menu at the top on all pages of your site. But the functionality presented doesn't limit to just regular menu items — tasks and all kinds of actions are also listed in the menu. This enables fast access to your every day tasks. You can find a demonstration of this module from here http://www.unleashedmind.com/drupal/admin_menu/.

[http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu]

Aloha

Aloha Editor

Aloha module integrates the excellent HTML5 wysiwyg editor Aloha Editor (http://aloha-editor.org/) to Drupal. With Aloha you don't have to press the edit link of an page or article when you want to make small changes but you can do it straight in the front end! Fixing typos and adding some text hasn't been this easy&fast before. Think how much time you can save while using this module! You can find a demonstration of this module from here http://aloha.dev.mearra.com.

[http://drupal.org/project/aloha]

Coffee

Coffee

Performance junkies like me like to do most of the tasks from the keyboard without the need to use your mouse/touchpad/whatever. For example in OS X people use tools like Spotlight, Alfred or LaunchBar to do all kind of tasks just using the keyboard. Well now you can use the same behavior in Drupal too! Just install Coffee and press alt+d (alt + shift + D in Opera, alt + ctrl + D in Windows Internet Explorer) and you get a Alfred-like popup where you can just start typing page names or whatever where you want to navigate. You can even define your own commands in your module with hook_coffee_command() see coffee.api.php for further documentation. You can see Coffee module in action in this screencast http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikGJl69jPJw.

[http://drupal.org/project/coffee]

Module filter

Module filter

While the module listing on modules page can get pretty long Module filter module comes in the rescue! With this module you can filter the modules list by either typing some keywords or using the module category listing to limit the amount of modules shown. With this module you can quickly find the module(s) you were trying to find and enable/disable them. A real life saver when handling modules!

[http://drupal.org/project/module_filter]

So what are your favorites? Are there some other modules that fall into this category and belong to your basic stack of modules that you use on every page you administer?

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Comments

22. February 2012 - 18:36 - Alex Weber (not verified)

I was familiar with all of these except for Aloha, awesome! :)

We always try to create simple and powerful administrative interfaces and these tools are indispensible!

That said, most of them target site builders and not necessarily the end user.

24. February 2012 - 14:41 - Paul (not verified)

In the demo site no changes seem to get saved. Is that a configuration thing? Can it be set to actually save the state of the change?

Otherwise looks very cool!

Ilari Mäkelä's picture

24. February 2012 - 15:16 - Ilari Mäkelä

It's on purpose on demo site that way. It doesn't save the changes so people can't misuse the site. Of course the actual version of the module will save the changes made on your own site.

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