Talking Drupal #505 - Custom Field Module

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