Disabling module updates

Okay, every honest Drupal developer knows, that hacking core is a bad thing. Hacking contributed module is not the best thing in the world, too — for obvious reasons: modules get updates , and updating module is very easy, unless you’ve applied some hacks to it.

But, sometimes, we need to apply some changes to some contrib module. If it is a big customer site, we can’t just say “Hey guys, your team can update this module and this module using drush, but don’t touch this module, please!”. That’s just ugly, that someone needs to remember such stuff — and I bet that in 2 weeks they forget and download new version of module from Drupal.org. And all our work is lost.

So, the solution here is to disable specific module updates automation. 

It was not so obvious for me. I’ve always thought that update status of module/theme is tracked using module/theme name (the .info file name without extension). That would mean that if developer renames theme, all blocks settings are reset, theme enabled status is reset to disabled, and all kinds of headaches like these. 

But things are much easier! Just go to .info file of the module, and you’ll see this:

; $Id: filefield.info,v 1.9 2009/04/01 08:57:49 quicksketch Exp $
name = FileField
description = Defines a file field type.
dependencies[] = content
package = CCK
core = 6.x
php = 5.0
; Information added by drupal.org packaging script on 2010-07-01
version = "6.x-3.7"
core = "6.x"
project = "filefield"
datestamp = "1277943012"

Do you see “project” line here? that’s what we need. Change it to something like “hacked_%modulename%” and you’re done.

Please keep in mind that the whole thing about hacking contributed modules is still ugly. Try to avoid that!

Important UPD from Dave Reid: update_advanced module does the trick!