Drupal: comparison of ‘related content’ modules
Posted February 12, 2010 – 11:42 am
I’ve been using two ‘related content’ modules on my Drupal websites for a while: Similar Entires module and Node Recommendation module. Now I want to trim back and use just one.
Drupal Related Content Modules
I came to use these two after trying out a whole bunch of Drupal related content modules. Check here for a good review of the related content choices – there are a lot of them. And here’s another useful, but less comprehensive review of Drupal related content modules. I suspect neither list is actually completely complete.
Most of these modules work off taxonomy terms in various ways. Some are more widely used than others and/or better supported. Interestingly, none seems to have really gained traction as the ‘go to’ module for related content.
I went with Similar Entries because it develops matches off the title and the body content vs. just taxonomy terms. In general, this seems like a good idea to me. As well, at the time I wasn’t using tagging on my sites, so Similar Entries was one of the few modules that would work at all. Now I do use taxonomy, but I’m not a prolific tagger, so I still like the idea of matching off titles and body content.
The module works pretty easily out of the box. It has relatively few settings, but has enough to get the job done well. Configuration involves activating a Similar Entries block somewhere on your page – then you check off several configuration options. These are related to teasers, to search engine handling, to the number of matches to display, and to the types of nodes used in generating matches (you can exclude some types).
I used this latter option – type of nodes to use in matches – to help solve a problem I was having with the module: from time to time, it would offer up matches like my privacy policy or terms of use pages. This was absurd, but it was quick work to fix this by defining a new content type and reassigning these types of pages to that new type (using the Nodetype module). Then I excluded that node type from the matching process and, viola, worked beautifully.
The most complicated configuration option has to be with how (if at all) you want Similar Entries to factor in taxonomy tags. If you choose one of the tag-dependent options, the module will determine best matches by scanning title / body content within a relevant set of tags.
Node Recommendations is a newer module and has very few users, but it is very powerful and flexible. At the same time, it is considerably more complicated and requires more energy to implement — it sufficiently complicated that I’m still not sure I’ve got it configured correctly.
Since I operate a lot of small sites, added configuration complexity effort is not a good thing — especially since these options are spread out over multiple screens in different admin locations. It seems like a lot of presence for a relatively simple function.
Node Recommendation module supports both automated matching and manual selection of related pages. The automated matching is done entirely off tags (which doesn’t work so great on my older sites which aren’t fully tagged — or even on my newer sites since I’m somewhat skimpy with tags).
Node Recommendation also allows highly customized page-by-page matching. For each node, it allows you to override the default matching parameters and/or to hand pick individual ‘related content’ matches. This feature seemed like an awfully good idea when I had only a few sites and was obsessed about the quality of matches for each and every page, but became wildly impractical as I launched more sites. I realized I just gotta live with some imperfection.
Neither of the modules generates match results for pages generated by the Views module. Both modules work well on pages with a lot of CCK content – though Node Recommendation probably gets the edge here because Similar Entries doesn’t have as much body content to work with.
At the end of the day, the choice is clear: Similar Entries is going to be my default related content module for my Drupal sites. It generates the best match results over the widest variety of conditions. It is also much easier to administer. Node Recommendations is just a couple notches too complicated – though I will miss the option to do manual selection
