Talking Drupal #505 - Custom Field Module

Jun 2, 2025

Andy Marquis, a seasoned Drupal developer with 16 years of experience, joins to discuss the Custom Field Module. He dives into its user-friendly features that allow custom field creation without coding. The conversation touches on real-world applications, integration with other Drupal components, and the module's flexibility for various projects. They also explore the Facet Bot Blocker, addressing bot traffic challenges. Insights into future enhancements and the impact of AI on web crawling add depth to this engaging discussion.

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ADVICE

Custom Field Module Benefits

Use the Custom Field Module to create complex field groups without programming.
It improves performance by consolidating multiple fields into a single table row.

INSIGHT

Enhanced Entity Referencing

Custom Field Module includes entity reference as a subfield enhancing flexibility.
This allows combining references with other fields providing richer context per item.

ADVICE

Views and Translation Support

Custom Field Module integrates well with Views and supports filters and sorting on subfields.
It also allows translating individual subfields for better multilingual content management.

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Today we are talking about the Custom Field Module, what it does, and why you might want to use it with guest Andy Marquis. We’ll also cover Facet Bot Blocker as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/505

Topics

Meet the Guest: Andy Marquee
Module of the Week: Facet Bot Blocker
Exploring the Custom Field Module
Benefits and Use Cases of Custom Field Module
Custom Field Module vs. Other Solutions
Advanced Features and Integrations
Reflecting on Past Projects and Key Value
Use Cases and Flexibility of Custom Fields
Advanced Features and Integrations
Challenges and Limitations
Future Roadmap and Improvements

Resources

Custom Field Module

Guests

Andy Marquis - drupal.org/project/custom_field apmsooner

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Norah Medlin - tekNorah

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

Brief description:
- Have you been looking for an inexpensive way to mitigate an upsurge of bot traffic on your Drupal site’s faceted search pages? There’s a module for that
Module name/project name:
- Facet Bot Blocker
Brief history
- How old: created in Mar 2025, so about two months ago, by John Brandenburg (bburg) of Forum One
- Versions available: 1.0.2 which support Drupal 10 and 11
Maintainership
- Actively maintained
- Security coverage
- Number of open issues: 4 open issues, one of which is a bug, but it did have a fix merged 4 days ago
Usage stats:
- 106 sites
Module features and usage
- A number of sites are seeing a huge upswing in bot traffic, and quite often a big part of that bot traffic is on one or more pages with faceted search
- Crawlers try to request every permutation of every possible combination of facets. If your page has multiple facets, and in particular facets that accept multiple values, the number of permutations becomes huge
- Facet Bot Blocker works by allowing you to set a maximum number of facet requests to allow, what error to return, and a custom HTML message to return to blocked user agents
- If you have Memcache or Redis available, it’s recommended to use the appropriate module, and Facet Bot Blocker will automatically store its settings there for reduced database reads
- The project page is also clear that if you are able to use a true Web Application Firewall (like Cloudflare or Akamai), that would be a better strategy. But if you don’t have one available, Facet Bot Blocker can help to mitigate the surges in bot traffic that are causing problems for many Drupal sites, particularly those hosted on platforms that charge based on usage