Talking Drupal #505 - Custom Field Module Talking Drupal podcast

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Talking Drupal #505 - Custom Field Module

6d ago 1:10:13

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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

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