Drupal 7 Tutorial Part 17: Drupal 7 Module Structure & Types Explained

Dear Drupalers,

Welcome to the Drupal 7 tutorial Part 17. After a long time i am back to the Drupal 7 series of tutorials. As per your choice, i am explaining the Drupal 7 Module Structure & Types below.

In Drupal 7 modules are categorized into three types as mentioned below.

• Core Drupal Modules.
• Contributed Modules.
• Custom Modules.

Core Drupal Modules:

• Modules that comes with Drupal Core are categorized as Core Drupal Modules. 

• When you download the Drupal Core from http://drupal.org/project/drupal , the modules that are present in the Zipped file are called Drupal Core Modules.
• You can find the core modules inside modules directory of Drupal Root as shown in below screen.

• Core modules are further categorized into two types.
  • Core Required Modules
  • Core Optional Modules
•  Core Required Modules are the modules which are necessary to Run Drupal CMS. Modules like User, System, Block, Node are some of the core required modules which you cannot disable from the modules list admin/modules .
• Core Optional Modules are the modules which comes with the core and can be enabled / disabled based on our requirements. For example, modules like Blog, Book, Color, Contact etc will fall into this category.

Contributed Modules:

• Contributed modules are the modules which we can download from drupal.org based on our requirements.
• All contributed modules are placed in  sites/all/modules/contrib folder after downloading them.
• You can find the contributed modules here. http://drupal.org/project/modules/
• For Example, Let's say you want to integrate rich text editor feature to Drupal forms. All you need to do is download http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg module and configure it.
• Like above module there are around 16000 modules that you can use it to extend functionality. That's the power of drupal.
• Stay tuned for next post, where i will explain how to install a module correct way in Drupal 7.

Custom Modules:

• Custom modules are the modules written by Developers to extend the functionality of core or contributed modules.
• Custom modules are developed to build functionality which is customized for your website.
• Custom modules are written using Drupal API.
• Custom modules are placed in sites/all/modules/custom directory.

Stay tuned to learn how to install nice menus module (Contributed module) to create parent child hierarichal menu tree in Drupal 7.

Hope you understand Drupal 7 module types. Please feel free to leave a comment if you have any Questions.

Thanks,

Anil Sagar