A few days ago, I released a new theme (SeeD Theme) in D.O. which has been with my company (SeeD E.M.) for a while now; I am not going to talk about it here (see this blog for details), but it is the reason this one exists, it took us so long to contribute it that I want to make sure it doesn't happen again.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen great modules (or themes) that should be contributed and haven't. Great modules not because they are massive and do tons of things, but because they do things in a brilliant way and will (and do) help others (like myself) create great sites in no time.

Yes, the most used modules in D.O. are (and have been) pretty big and complex: Views, Ctools, Panels, CCK (D6 era), Date, Webforms; But some others are small, and absolutely awesome! And without those simple modules that extend the Big Ones, it would be the same as not having anything at all (well, not really, just being dramatic, but they do help a lot).

This post is the story of one module that I deprecated in favour of an older one (and it felt good).

Maxlength JS

As it has happened many times at SeeD E.M., we were dealing with what was becoming an overly boring task, code a module that would limit the characters in a field for Drupal 7. No module existed at the moment for D7, so we, again, coded it, making it a bit better than the last time, and again, I asked the developers to contrib the module, and again it didn't happen; but that day I decided it had to be done, and with johnnygamba which at the time worked with us, developed Maxlength JS and made it a module in D.O.

Not long after that, I opened an issue for Maxlength (which I found later on) where I mentioned that my module existed and did pretty much the same thing, and had a D7 version. Long story short, our module became the all new Maxlength Verison 3 Branch with this note from one of the developers of Maxlength about mine (and I quote):

this is really a damn small effective module!

Believe me when I tell you that even today I see that line and smile for an hour (or more), and here is the trick: I am NOT a developer, I am a designer that learned PHP with PHP for Dummies, so even though I killed my one project, someone liked it! and yes, it felt great, and there it is, an incredibly simple module being used by more than 5000 sites!

Dare yourself!

Make your modules available, and we will all benefit form it! I've learned a lot thanks to the issues that others have opened on my projects, and I honestly appreciate the feedback.

Doesn't matter if you module doesn't become a success , I have a module that is being used by 26 sites and is 3 years old, but hey, I helped 26 sites, which to me is more than awesome!

If you are somewhere in the queue for your application to be reviewed, contact me and I'll have a look at your code, who know, it might be the module I've been looking for.