I've been noticing more and more lately, that for every new Drupal site I build, I define a lot of custom blocks. I put the code for these blocks in one or more custom modules, and most of them are really simple. For me, at least, the most common task that these blocks perform, is to display one or more fields of the node (or other entity) page currently being viewed; and in second place, is the task of displaying a list of nodes from a nodequeue (as I'm rather a Nodequeue module addict, I tend to have nodequeues strewn all over my sites).

In short, I've gotten quite bored of copy-pasting the same block definition code over and over, usually with minimal changes. I also feel that such simple block definitions don't warrant defining a new custom module – as they have zero interesting logic / functionality, and as their purpose is purely presentational, I'd prefer to define them at the theme level. Additionally, every Drupal module has both administrative overhead (need to install / enable it on different environments, need to manage its deployment, etc), and performance overhead (every extra PHP include() call involves opening and reading a new file from disk, and every enabled Drupal module is a minimum of one extra PHP file to be included); so, less enabled modules means a faster site.

To make my life easier – and the life of anyone else in the same boat – I've written the Handy Block module. (As the project description says,) if you often have a bunch of custom modules on your site, that do nothing except implement block hooks (along with block callback functions), for blocks that do little more than display some fields for the entity currently being viewed, then Handy Block should… well, it should come in handy! You'll be able to do the same thing in just a few lines of your template.php file; and then, you can delete those custom modules of yours altogether.