Web Design

Custom Drupal Modules

I have submitted my first patch for a Drupal module.  It adds a major new feature to the Follow module.

Quick explanation: You know how every site has links to Facebook now?  And LinkedIn, and Twitter, etc.  It's important to integrate your site with the popular social networks.  But on site after site, I found myself hand-rolling blocks of content to display these links.  A famous mathematician said, “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”  Is there an easier way to add social networking links?  Of course there is: the Follow module.

This is the beauty of an open-source CMS like Drupal: There are thousands of community-contributed modules.  If you want a feature that's not built in, odds are someone has already written a module that does just that.

In this case, the Follow module is excellent, but it has a limited list of networks that it supports, and that list doesn't include Yelp or Google+.  So I wrote a patch.  The main new feature is the ability to create your own custom network links.  The patch hasn't been committed yet, but I've already applied it to this website; you can see it in the lower right corner, right below this post.

This is exactly how the open source community is supposed to work: people receive, and people give back.  The community as a whole benefits.  If there wasn't an open source CMS available for me to use, it would cost me untold thousands of dollars in time and effort to create my own, or purchase an expensive proprietary solution.  (Closed-source CMS's do exist, although for the life of me I can't figure out why anyone uses them.)  I have received the benefit of tens of thousands of dollars' worth of labor from other people, and I received it for free.  In return, I'm offering a feature that has been requested by dozens of people.  Now they don't have to waste their own time and effort developing this feature, and they don't have to pay for it either.  Is this the new hippie paradigm?  Maybe.  But open source is a multimillion dollar industry now; this ain't 1969.

Bottom line: If I can patch a module, I can create a module from scratch.  This opens up major possibilities for web design and development using Drupal.  If you need advanced Drupal design with custom modules, let's talk.