Drupal Blog Modules

Drupal 7 has taken big steps to make the interface easier to use and catch up with Wordpress in that area. But much as we all love Drupal, Wordpress still makes it easier to set up a blog. If you need the power of Drupal but you want a modern blog, here are some modules you can use to enhance the experience. Unfortunately many of them aren't stable in Drupal 7 yet but most of them seem to be close.

There are two areas where you can enhance your Drupal-based blog. The default Drupal functionality along with the Views module is fully capable of creating a list of posts with comments on them and simple navigation. However if you want to have your blog posts noticed, you'll need some help. Wordpress automatically includes features such as SEO settings and trackbacks/pingbacks. As soon as you create a post it's easy for others to find and in some cases it's already listed on other sites.

You can also enhance the interface to help users navigate and interact with your blog. With sidebars to navigate the archives and an improved commenting system you can get visitors to read more posts and come back more.

Some things you might want to add to your blog include:

• Pinging blog aggregators to get your post noticed
• Allowing trackbacks and pingbacks with other blogs
• Creating category browsing, archive navigation, and a tag cloud
• Using an improved comment systems to encourage interaction
• Using SEO enhancements to be found more easily
• Making it easier to share your posts on social networking sites
• Showing recent / top commenters
• Writing posts in advance and scheduling their publication date and time
• Writing posts with formatting and embedded media
• Using analytics to monitor traffic

You can use the following modules to help do this:

• Blog module (Drupal core): although you could use Views as well, this makes it easy to enable basic blogging features.
• Pathauto: make sure your posts have friendly URLs to help search engines and users.
• Views: if you don't have it already, use it to create sidebars and pages to navigate your archives.
• Multiping: submits new blog posts to the pingomatic service so they can be found sooner.
• Vinculum: allows your blog to send and receive trackbacks and pingbacks.
• Technorati: creates technorati tags in your content and submits new posts to technorati, also helping it to get found sooner.
• Disqus: replaces the default Drupal commenting system with Disqus to provide a better user interface and allow users to connect to other accounts.
• SEO Checklist: helps make sure your site is following SEO rules.
• Service Links: creates links to share your blog posts on social networking sites.
• Metatag: add meta tags to your blog posts.
• Scheduler: have your posts published automatically at a future date.
• WYSIWYG: the classic text editor module to make posting easier.
• IMCE: add a media browser to your text editor for easier image uploads.
• Google Analytics: after all that, don't forget to see how people get to your blog and what they do there!
• Clicky Analytics: an alternative to Google Analytics that lets you see visits in real-time and look at the path each visitor took through your site.

Some of these modules are in use on this blog. Keep watching to learn more about how to build a complete blog in Drupal!