Announcing Module Builder module

At lunch one day at the OSCMS conference in Vancouver, a few of us were sitting around the lunch table, sort of lamenting the fact that there was so much work needed to create new modules. First you have to remember, "What are the hooks I need again?" Then you have to remember, "What are the arguments for the such-and-such hook again?" and so on and so on. Wouldn't it be cool if there was a tool that would let you pick what kind of module you wanted to make, would automatically select the hooks you needed, and then generate the code for you?

Well, Module Builder is intended to be such a tool, as well as a tool to help new developers get on their feet with module development and learn how hooks work and so on. I've been kind of toiling away on it in my spare time for about a month now, have shown it to the developers' list a few weeks back, and now I think it's maybe ready to show it to a broader audience.

In a nutshell, here's how it works:

1. You enable the module just like any other module.
2. You go to the "module builder" menu (which is tied to an "access module builder" permission)
3. You fill in details about your module, such as the name, description, and so on.
4. You can select from either pre-defined hook groups, and/or expand the fieldsets to select specific hooks you need.
5. Click "Submit" and receive a textarea with the code to your module inside. Simply copy/paste into a .module file, save it to your modules directory, and you're good to go!

It has a couple kind of nifty features, including:

1. The hook list is parsed directly from the hook documentation in CVS. The first time you hit either the settings page or the form, it will grab these files for you. Afterwards, you can keep them updated by hitting the "Update" button in the settings page (thanks to jjeff for this suggestion).
2. If you don't like the default output of the hooks, or you want to define your own custom hook groupings, you can! Just copy the .template files and rename them to XXXX-custom.template, and then your custom template will override the defaults.
3. It has an option to turn off the comments directed to newbies if you're an advanced developer and only want to use the tool for generating skeleton code (thanks to hunmonk for this suggestion).

Anyway, please give it a shot and let me know what you think! :) Note that there is only a CVS version available right now, because there will probably be bugs, and I *know* there will be improvements that can be made. ;) Please use the issue tracker to log any bugs or feature requests (and patches! :D).

I'm especially interested in anything that will help usability-wise and documentation-wise to get new developers up to speed faster, and ways in which to make this a more useful tool to seasoned developers as well. If you have some ideas of better/additional hook groupings, or comments on the architecture, please let me know that as well.

Thanks, and enjoy!