Drupal research strategy (custom or off-the-shelf module)
When you get a description of a project that needs to be done with Drupal and some additional functionality is required (besides the main and most popular modules), how do you decide how to do it?
Do you spend a day or two (or a week?) Looking for every possible module, narrowing down the list? What is the critical moment to start writing your own module? What is the critical moment to start modifying a more or less suitable module?
To be more precise, imagine that I am going to make a time booking system in Drupal 5, but there are no modules that do exactly what I want.
What are the most important pros and cons when it comes to choosing a site for a Drupal project?
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I will only use a pre-built module if:
- this is for UI purposes. For example, an image gallery.
- it is really, really well consolidated (like the views module, like imagecache), specializes in one task and does it well, and if it serves my purpose without any changes (because it just fits because I can adapt the requirements to match them or because it offers extension points like api or such)
- what I need to achieve is peripheral to the system and there is a module that will do something like this and it is easy to modify and then save
I'll do mine if:
- functionality is the "kernel" for my system and there is no module that fits
- the modules I found are new, not actively supported, messy coded, etc.
In fact, I usually prefer to code my own modules, which I have full control over, than to use them, with the risk of having more problems with them than benefits.
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I would say that it really depends on what you want to do. If what you want to do is not difficult and you cannot find a module for it. Chances are, even if you find one or one that is close, you end up spending more time searching, which you would have spent creating your own. Where that line is depends on how skilled you are and how close you are to Drupal. After doing a lot of small custom modules, you end up with a lot of snippets that you can reuse to create new modules pretty quickly.
Sometimes you can even take a module and make your own to modify it to make the starting position fit your needs. For me, I usually don't spend more than a few hours looking for a module. If I can't find it by then, usually
- Not supported and deprecated.
- Still in development
Even if you can start from the head a bit, you may end up failing with bad database designs and the like. But it's hard to tell where the gap is in the use of others halfway through the code. It depends on how hard or how long you have to spend YOU to do this against the fight you use with her.
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