Top Drupal Integrations For 2021
If you would like to enrich your Drupal website with new and powerful capabilities, there may be no need to reinvent the wheel. Lots of useful third-party applications like CRMs, payment gateways, newsletter services, live chats, and more, are ready to be added to your website. You can do it without hassle thanks to special community-created Drupal modules that facilitate Drupal integration with other systems.
Drupal’s integration capabilities in 2021: what’s new?
Now that Drupal 9’s first anniversary has passed, we can see that the times for the best third-party integration opportunities are there. The initiative to make Drupal better-structured for more integrations started with Drupal 8 and continues through Drupal 9. It has been one of the strategic development tracks for Drupal 9 announced by Drupal’s creator Dries Buytaert. An amazing pack of Drupal core modules — RESTful Web Services, HAL, Serialization, HTTP Basic Authentication, and JSON:API — keep making Drupal more capable of sharing its data with any types of applications.
The creators of contributed modules for Drupal integrations with specific services are also busy updating their modules, making them compatible with Drupal 9, and adding new features to them. Our collection of top Drupal third-party integration modules will include some freshly updated ones. Let’s see how they work to build bridges between external services and your website.
Best newly updated Drupal integration modules
Mailchimp
The popular email delivery service will be neatly “delivered” to your website thanks to the Mailchimp integration module. The module will provide you with a user-friendly interface to manage your Mailchimp mailing lists, create Mailchimp subscription forms, generate campaigns, and view their history. For your Drupal integration with Mailchimp, the module will ask you to add your Mailchimp API key to your site.
The Mailchimp module has had a new version released on March 16, 2021. Version 2.0.2 is a bugfix release of a major update, Mailchimp 2.0, which got improvements in the translation of the Mailchimp interface, GDPR compliance, campaign UX, and Drupal 9 compatibility.
What the ImageX developers say:
“Mailchimp Drupal integration is a very robust and stable solution. You might add it to the project and give the ability to your marketing department to do everything on their own from the admin interface.”
Salesforce Suite
The Salesforce Suite module facilitates your Drupal website’s integration with the world’s leading customer relationship management system — Salesforce. Drupal has entities (content nodes, users, etc.) and Salesforce has objects (contacts, organizations, etc.), but it’s no problem for the module to provide perfect synchronization between these different types of elements at the field level.
For perfect Drupal integration with Salesforce, it also takes care of the data pushing and pulling when some updates have been made. The suite includes a bunch of helpful modules such as Salesforce Integration, Salesforce Mapping, Salesforce Push, and more.
The module’s multiple 5.x versions released in March 2021 have addressed a number of issues with backward compatibility and become cleaner from deprecated code.
SendGrid Integration
SendGrid, the communication platform for transactional and marketing emails, can integrate with your website easily via the SendGrid Integration module. The module perfectly cooperates with the Drupal mail system. Your emails will be sent quickly and efficiently through SendGrid’s cloud-based delivery services using their RESTful API.
The module’s creators are actively updating it to support Sendgrid API V3 API. This is the key innovation in its 8.x-2.x branch, for which we have seen a number of fresh releases since the beginning of 2021.
What the ImageX developers say:
“SendGrid connection is a good choice for small to mid-level projects that don't want to configure their own mail server but want to give the proper attention to the emails that are coming from their website. All you have to do is to set up your SendGrid key.”
Hubspot
Another Drupal integration much appreciated by marketers is the integration with the Hubspot inbound marketing software platform. The Hubspot module for Drupal works in a tandem with the Webform module. It collects the data that your website’s users send to you via web forms (subscriptions, ratings, etc.) and sends it to your Hubspot account where you can use it for your campaigns.
Since the beginning of the year 2021, the Hubspot module has seen a bunch of fresh releases. Its creators keep working both on its 8.1.x branch and also the 3.x version — a release for Drupal 8 and 9 that uses the hubspot-php library.
Leaflet
Maps on your website can look much more informative and engaging if created with a touch of interactivity. The Leaflet Drupal module provides your website’s integration with Leaflet JS — an open-source JavaScript library for creating mobile-friendly maps with interactive controls. The module gives you a lightweight and easy-to-use Leaflet API, a special field formatter for Drupal geo-related fields, integration with Drupal Views via the Leaflet Views submodule, etc.
The Leaflet module’s 2.x branch has been updated half a dozen times since the beginning of the year 2021. The creators have been actively adding new features related to the compatibility with Drupal’s new Claro theme, the storing of latitude and longitude data as decimals, the support for new GeofieldBackend, and more.
What the ImageX developers say:
“Leaflet provides fully functional maps with all features that you may need in building your solutions with geodata. It has perfect support for mobile devices. Leaflet is the best alternative to Google Maps and it is absolutely free.”
AddToAny Share Buttons
Drupal has quite a big collection of social media integration modules, the AddToAny Share Buttons being one of the most popular choices. It enables you to add sharing buttons to your website’s content pages for any social network — the list of available ones is really impressive and there is also a possibility to add custom services. In addition, there is a universal sharing button.
The module’s development team keeps it updated and stable. Its latest version released in March has important fixes regarding unsaved node previews, specific use cases of website URL sharing, and more.
reCAPTCHA v3
The Drupal reCAPTCHA v3 module helps you protect your website from spam bots and malicious software via the integration with the latest version of Google’s reCAPTCHA solution. Unlike earlier versions, reCAPTCHA v3 does not make users decipher hard-to-read text or match images — it uses new ways of telling a human from a bot. ReCAPTCHA v3 works invisibly for users and sends your website admin a probability score from 0.0 to 1.0 of a particular user being human. The module provides an interface for you to set up and customize reCAPTCHA v3 on your Drupal website.
In early 2021, we saw the module’s 8.x-1.4 version that had a dozen issues resolved — ones with validation errors, reCAPTCHA token retrieval, cacheable settings, and more.
What the ImageX developers say:
“Since Drupal is a very famous CMS, many bots are attacking your forms every day. This requires applying new anti-spam techniques from time to time. The reCAPTCHA module is one of the best tools from the antibot ecosystem in 2021.”
Media entity Instagram
Next comes the module that takes care of Drupal oEmbed integration for Instagram. The Media entity Instagram module adds Instagram integration to the Drupal core Media system by using Instagram’s oEmbed API. In addition to the standard Drupal media type options, the module offers you to create a new media type by selecting “Instagram” as a media source. This brings Instagram HTML and metadata to your website.
The module’s maintainers regularly update it, with the latest version, 3.0.5, released in March 2021. It is a bugfix release of the new major branch of this module that implements the new Facebook Graph API.
Search API Solr
Maybe it’s time to supercharge your website search? One of the best options here is Drupal integration with the powerful open-source Apache Solr search engine. It can easily cope even with the most complicated search tasks (faceted search, multi-index search, location-based search, etc.) and work very fast even on large, traffic-heavy sites.
The Search API Solr Drupal module helps you configure Solr search on your Drupal website. It works in a duet with the Search API module, for which it provides an Apache Solr backend.
Since the beginning of the year 2021, the Search API Solr module has seen numerous updates both to its 8.x branch and the new 4.x branch — a unified solution compatible with Drupal 8 and 9, as well as with multiple versions of the Solr engine.
“The module saves a lot of the development hours thanks to quick and simple installation and configuration. The popular platforms like Acquia Cloud and Pantheon provide a Solr server out of the box and this module makes the integration very smooth.”
To sum up
Your website can do so many things, thanks to the extensive options for Drupal integration modules, many actions are made easy. Get any of the above-described modules set up for you or a customer-tailored Drupal solution created to meet your needs. Let’s make your website more powerful in 2021!
If you're unsure which integrations you should select for your digital environment, our team would be happy to talk through your options.
