One of the challenges with marketing Drupal is that, since it is so powerful and flexible, it doesn't really focus on any niche area of application. With well over 300 contributed modules, it can be hard to get a grasp of what's do-able with an "out-of-the-box" installation. There is no One Way to use Drupal.

So how to get the word out? One way that helps is by explaining, mentioning and reviewing various contributed modules that expand the core Drupal feature set in interesting and powerful ways.

In the past couple of weeks, a handful of stand-out blogging efforts have taken on, in various ways, what particular Drupal modules and module packages can do for a Drupal site.

Ted Serbinski at Lullabot has written a nice review of the audio module:

Great module! This module makes use of the wonderful getID3 PHP library for reading and writing ID3 tags for mp3 and other audio files. Creating a new audio file is as simple as creating a new 'audio' node type. The ID3 tags are extracted from the audio file and displayed in the node listing. The title can optionally be automatically set using the ID3 tag information, by default it is artist - song title. The node body itself contains all of the ID3 information for the audio file, with links for each of the fields. This allows a user, for instance, to find all audio files by artist, title, album, genre, and year, by simply clicking the link. Additionally, the length and format of the file are extracted and displayed too. And the best feature, it includes the XSPF Flash player so you can play the audio file right on the website, without having to download! If a user does want the audio file, there is a download link available as well.

We're using the audio module in a music site (to be announced in the next couple of weeks) - very nice!

On WorldChanging, Alexandra Samuel has a nice little guest blog post on the Aggregator2 module:

Aggregator2 turns the Drupal platform into a powerful tool for news tracking and republishing by offering options for customizing news feeds, tagging news items, and moderating incoming news.

That feature set makes Aggregator2 an exceptionally flexible choice for setting up a nonprofit news tracker that aggregates news from a wide range of blogs, news sites and search engines. Because Aggregator2 saves each individual item as an independent node (like a web page) in Drupal, you can edit or annotate news items after you bring them onto your site. Because Aggregator2 lets you assign different tags to different incoming feeds, you can set up different news pages for different topics, and direct news to show up on the appropriate pages. And Aggregator2 is also a terrific tool for integrating content from multiple related web sites or overlapping organizations.

This serves as a nice, brief summary of what you can do with this module. (Hat tip to Taran for the link.)

We've used Aggregator2 on a handful of sites (including an older version of the module on our own hosting site).

Gordon Heydon has set up a demo of the relatively new views module, which allows developers to easily configure various custom and user-changable displays of content on Drupal-powered websites, without requiring php snippets or hacks.

And in the moblogging arena, Sami Khan mentions a new module that enables sending pictures from your cell phone to your Drupal site. He links to Stuart, who's announced that this module has been replaced by a new one he's written, mailsave, which allows posting of email attachments to one's website. Stuart then links to the mobile media blog module, which builds off of his module for more expanded features optimized for Drupal 4.7.

Finally, not to be missed is Zack Rosen's first screencast posted in March on the organic groups modules package. This package is undergoing rapid ongoing development by some of Drupal's finest coders, so Zack's screencast may already be a little out-of-date. But still, it's an excellent intro to what you can do with the powerful groups feature-set for Drupal. We're implementing this module in a fascinating new community site launching this summer. (More on that later.)

• Laura's blog
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•