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As of 2011, none of the glossary modules is intended as a plug-in replacement for the original glossary module already available with drupal since its humble beginnings. Each of the alternatives was designed for slightly different needs, and this page is here to help you choose which module you should probably be using, or if you should really write your own. Lexicon evolved from glossary to accomodate yet another set of requirements, and glossify started with needs similar to glossary, but evolved to a much more diverse set of features; only those relevant to glossaries should be listed here.
Left-to-right order by date of creation. Empty cells means info not yet available. Please contribute !
TODO: import “features discussion” from the 2008 glossary comparison table, which updated the very obsolete http://drupal.org/node/266511, currently unavailable for edit except to members of the Drupal doc team due to the Full HTML format, but has now become partly obsolete itself. The 2008 chart is now imported.
| Feature | Glossary | G2 | Glossify | G2 Refactoring |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drupal-related (2023-05) | ||||
| Maintenance | Abandoned | Minimal | Active | Postponed |
| Drupal 10.x | No | -dev | Yes | No |
| Drupal 9.x | No | -dev | Yes | No |
| Drupal 8.x | alpha1 | -dev | Yes | No |
| Drupal 7.x | -dev | -dev | Yes | Yes |
| Drupal 6.x | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Drupal 5.x | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Drupal 4.7.x | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Drupal 4.6.x | Yes | No | No | No |
| Earlier Drupal versions | Yes | No | No | No |
| AJAX | No | Some autocompletion | ||
| Storage | terms | nodes, 1 type | nodes (types ?) | any entity |
| Revision support | No | core | core | |
| Simpletest | No | A few | Yes | |
| Services provided | Glossary | G2 | Glossify | G2 future |
| multiple glossaries on one site | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| RSS feeds on entries | core | No | core (?) | |
| RSS feeds on additional vocabularies | No | core | core | core |
| classify entries | No | core taxonomy | core taxonomy | core fields |
| commenting on entries | No | core | core | core |
| private editorial information | No | Builtin (⇐ 7), core (>= 8) | Use CCK | core fields |
| alphabar maintenance | automatic | manual | defaults + override | |
| remote glossaries | No | Yes, limited | Yes | |
| steganographic content protection | No | Yes | ||
| RDF information | No | Yes | ||
| i18n | Glossary | G2 | Glossify | G2 future |
| Translation template supplied | Yes | Yes | ||
| Multilingual blocks | No | |||
| Translatable content | Use i18nterms | Use i18ncontent | Use i18ncontent | |
| Feature blocks | Glossary | G2 | Glossify | G2 future |
| Alphabar | No | Yes | Use Views | Default View |
| Daily | Yes | Yes | Use Views | Default View |
| Latest | No | Yes | Use Views | Default View |
| Random | Yes | Yes | Use Views | Default View |
| Search glossary | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Content filtering | Glossary | G2 | Glossify | G2 future |
| Input, automatic | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Input, automatic, stop list | Single language | No | No | i18n support |
| Input, explicit | No | Yes, dfn element | No | Yes, custom element |
| Output, automatic | No | No | Yes | |
| auto “title” on links | No | No | Teaser / Disambiguation | |
| Disambiguation pages | n.a. | Yes, limited | default + override | |
| Disambiguation targeting in links | n.a. | No | Yes, on explicit | |
| 3rd party integration | Glossary | G2 | Glossify | G2 future |
| Quality Agent | No | No | Yes | |
| Views: basic | core | core + specific | core + specific | |
| Views: default views | No | No | Yes | |
| Wikipedia | No | No | Yes, with i18n | |
| Zeitgeist | No | No | Yes | |
| Performance | Glossary | G2 | Glossify | G2 future |
| memory needs/number of entries | O(n) | O(1) | O(n) (?) | |
| speed on small glossaries | faster | slower | slower | |
| speed on large glossaries | slower with size | remains constant | slower with size | |
| Themeing | Glossary | G2 | Glossify | G2 future |
| - home page | core | |||
| - search form | Yes | core | core | |
| - node overview | Yes | core | core | |
| - definition fields | n.a. | Yes | Use CCK | core fields |
| - each feature block | n.a. | Yes | Use Views | |
| Specific class on glossary links | Yes | Yes | ||
| Implementation | Templates | Theme functions | Templates | |
| Developer features | Glossary | G2 | Glossify | G2 future |
| XML-RPC API | No | alphabar latest top random word of the day | No | |
| Web services security | n.a. | IP-based access control throttling | n.a. | |
| UI module separate from Data API | No | No | Yes |
Obviously, in all cases, a “No” actually means: “roll your own”, as in all Open Source software.