Talking Drupal #505 - Custom Field Module

June 02, 2025

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.

Listen:

direct Link

Topics

  • What does Custom Field do
  • Why is this a module
  • Is this similar to FieldGroup
  • Difference between Entity Reference and Entity Reference Revisions
  • How is this different from Paragraphs or Storage
  • How does this work with translation and views
  • What are some common use cases
  • When would you not use Custom Field
  • How does this work with JSON API
  • Would you recommend Custom Field for headless
  • Roadmap

Resources

Custom Field Module

Module of the Week

Facet Bot Blocker
  • 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:
  • 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