drupal

If you want to contribute actual changes to the Drupal software, you have to do it through patches. Patches are a kind of text file that describe the changes in a way that lets them easily be applied to the official code base. To create them, you have to jump through a couple of hoops, especially checking out Drupal head from CVS and creating the actual patch from the changes you made.

Contrary to popular belief among the developer community, creating patches is not easy for some. Using the text-only interface of the command line is a big hurdle for the more visually oriented. I finally found a way to do this CVS-checkout-and-patching thing without using the command line but through a free app with a graphical user interface.

“…Surgical teams that follow a basic checklist in the operating room, from discussing expected blood loss to confirming the patient's name, reduced the rate of deaths and complications by more than a third.” (source)

Drupal module development will hopefully not cost human lives one way or the other. But when building your module's UI the same principle is at work. It's all too easy to skip the basics, and go straight for the more complex parts of the problem. That’s the interesting part after all.

There’s literally thousands of contributed modules out there. If you have forty of those installed on your web site, the user experience will be much improved if the UI for each behaves in consistent ways. We hear developers wouldn’t mind having some advice on how to do this, either.