There are some interesting side effects coming out of the Summer of Code projects. It is often the case that the most useful and interesting functionality can come as a side effect of reaching another goal. Sometimes in order to build something you need to make a tool. The thing you build may or may not be great, but the tool itself becomes famous.

One of the real and growing advantages of Drupal is its ability to make content relate to other content. There are a number of node relation modules available, many of which are listed on the Best Related Links project page.

One of the Drupal Summer of Code programmers, Wolfgang Ziegler, recently posted a message to the development list about a module written as a side effect of his very interesting Node Profile project (project profile here). Node Profile will allow Drupal admins to create and make available a very detailed and diverse registration and profile path for users. By building a super profile out of multiple nodes, an admin will be able to provide a spectrum of views of user profile data. Also, users will be able to present themselves differently in different contexts, showing other users only the information that is relevant or appropriate in that context. These parts of a profile would be created as different nodes using different content types created using the excellent Content Construction Kit.

Presented with the technical challenges of showing information from multiple related nodes, and from multiple users, Ziegler has created Views Fusion. This module will allow the Views Module to leverage his own nodefamily node relations module (and others since it is written generically) and “melt” views together. The module currently requires a patch, so it isn’t really ready for mainstream use. It is definitely a module to watch if you want to extend your usage of Views.