Top 20 Wordpress plugins and their Drupal equivalent

Wordpress is a popular blogging platform like google blogger. It provides more flexibility than blogger. If you want setup a good looking blog site quickly without knowing more technical stuff, then Wordpress should be the most likely choice for you . It provides a lot of plugins that just enable to activate more user friendly functionalities.

Wordpress is a Content Management System(CMS) build around PHP and MySQL. Like Wordpress, Drupal is also a CMS build around PHP and MySQL with almost all the strengths of Wordpress. But Drupal is more developer centric and customizable and robust when compared to Wordpress and it useful for developing Medium and large Websites, other than just a blog site. 

Due to the huge fanbase and ease of programming, Wordpress has numerous plugins at its disposal. There are Drupal equivalents for most of these. Here is our take on a few popular Wordpress plugins and their equivalent Drupal modules.


1. Akismet - It is a Wordpress plugin that check your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog's "Comments" admin screen.

 Mollom is the Drupal equivalent of Akismet and is a popular spam prevention service module. Drupal version of Akismet module also available

2. All in one SEO pack - Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization)


 Drupal has several tested and proven modules available in the Drupal core as well as in the contributed section. The most popular ones are

1. Path – core module
2. Pathauto
3. Path redirect
4. Search 404
5. Page title
6. Nodewords ( A new module Metatagsis on development to replace nodewords. Currently there is a quick solution to use Metatags Quick available for Drupal

3. Bad Behavior - It prevents spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your Wordpress site in the first place.

 Bad Behavior is available for Drupal and it is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referer, however.

4. Broken Line Checker - It will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.

 Link Checker is the Drupal module to detect broken hypertext links.

5. Contact Form 7 - Wordpress plugin that can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

 Drupal has core module Contact, for Simple contact us form. Webform can be used to create any type of custom forms. It supports csv export of the collected information. It is also possible to use captcha with webforms.

6. Google Analytics for Wordpress - WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily and with lots of metadata.

The Google Analytics module for Drupal incorporates all the features of the Wordpress plugin for Drupal.

7.  Google XML sitemaps for Worpress - This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.

Drupal has also a Google XML Sitemap module with the same functionality.

8. GTranslate is a Wordpress plugin that provides an automatic translation service to translate your web page with Google power. With the ability to translate over 58 available languages your site will be available to more than 98% of Internet users.

GTranslate for Drupal does the same thing in Drupal and has been coded by the same author.

9. Lightbox Plus is a Wordpress plugin that permits users to view larger versions of images, simple slide shows, videos and content all in an overlay. It uses the popular colorbox jquery plugin.

Colorbox module for Drupal will provide full integration of the colorbox plugin.

10. MapPress is is the most popular and easiest way to create great-looking Google Maps and driving directions in your Wordpress blog.

In Drupal Gmap is the advanced and complete google map solution in Drupal. If you just want a basic google map embedded in a page, use LocationMap or Simplemap as per your requirements.

11. Newsletter is a Wordpress plug-in that lets you collect subscribers on your blog with a single or double opt-in subscription process. Double opt-in is law compliant and it means the user has to confirm the subscription following simple standard instructions sent to him via email.

Simplenews Drupal module - It can be used to send newsletters. Both anonymous and authenticated users can opt-in to different mailing lists. HTML email can be send by adding the Mime Mail module.

12. NextGEN Gallery Wordpress plugin is a fully integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option. Before I started writing the plugin I studied all the existing image and gallery plugins for WordPress. Some of them are really good and well designed, but the gap I filled was a simple administration system at the back end which can also handle multiple galleries.

There are no equivalent ready made solutions available for Drupal, though there are some modules like Fast Gallery available, it will not stand anywhere near the features provided by the nextgen gallery.

The best way to create a custom image gallery in Drupal is to use the content types, image field and views. You can use modules like DDBlock, Views_Slideshow using views and content types.

13. Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge of Apache .htaccess files.

Path redirect is the popular alternative in Drupal

14. Simple Tags add some tools for taxonomies like Terms suggestion, Mass Edit Terms, Auto link Terms, Ajax Autocompletion, Click Terms, Auto terms, Advanced manage term

In Drupal: By default Drupal taxonomies support tags with auto-complete option. Other features like tagcloud and manage tags can be done using the

1. Tagadalic For tagclouds
2. Taxonomy Manager - Manage taxonomies
3. Community tags - allow users to tag content and track it.

15. Social Plugins - Wordpress comes with the popular social plugins Addtoany and Addthis.

Both of these plugins provide share icons of the popular social bookmarking websites. Add-to-any allows integration with google analytics and Addthis allows customization of the social icons.

Both Addtoany and Addthis are available as modules for installation in Drupal to enhance your social experience while using Drupal

16. WP e-Commerce is a free WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin that lets customers buy your products, services and digital downloads online.

Ubercart is the popular tool for ecommerce applications in Drupal. It is a superior e-commerce solution available when compared to the wordpress equivalent and has tons of features.

17. WP-DB-Backup is a Wordpress plugin that allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.

In Drupal the Backup and Migrate module (is the best automated backup solution integrated with Drupal.)

18. WP Security Scan is a Wordpress plugin that scans your WordPress installation for any security vulnerabilities.

 Security review is the Drupal module that offers the same functionality will do the same kind of security check for Drupal.

19. WP-Super Cache is a Wordpress plugin that generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Boost is the popular alternative in Drupal for static page caching

20. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. 

Similar Entries is the Drupal equivalent module that can do this same task.

Posted in: Drupal, PHP, Wordpress