Strings to my bow

Last week I was lucky enough to gain maintainership of another Drupal module; Block Title Link.

As long as there is time in the day and I haven't fallen asleep at my desk I find it hard not to learn something, fix things, break modules and experiment with other people's inventions. Whether it's Drupal or something else I like to take things apart (metaphorically when talking about code) and see how it all fits. Even if I don't understand it for the most part the general gist stays with me.

So after seeing that the module required someone new to take the reigns I stepped forward and was offered the opportunity to show what I could do!

So if you're new to Drupal, have written some custom modules of your own and want to start contributing back to the community there are a couple of good pathways:

• Think of a unique concept, write a module for it and get yourself approved as a maintainer.
• Write a few patches for an active module, slowly become ingratiated with the maintainer and offer to co-maintain.
• Find a dead module and request the ownership of it in the Drupal webmasters issue queue.

I'm a huge advocate of giving back to the community and paying it forward. If nobody shares then we all limit the next generation of people who share which in turn limits the evolution of the project.

The future of the Block Title Link module

I've blasted through a few of the Drupal 7 RTBC and 'low hanging fruit' issues which are now fixed in the latest dev release. These will shortly be released in the 7.x-1.4 release of the module.

I've mentally planned how to solve the remaining issues in the queue and will do so for Drupal 7 first before the new year. Following this I'll branch the Drupal 6 version of the module and create a backport from the Drupal 7 version so the features are as similar as they can be with the only differences likely to be API based.

It's a module I've used, it's useful, people rely on it, so why don't I finish adding all the random features that users want!

Watch as my bold claims to finish this soon turn around and bite me!