Book Image

Drupal 7 First Look

Book Image

Drupal 7 First Look

Overview of this book

Drupal 7 contains features for which site administrators have been clamoring for years, including support for fields, an improved administration interface, better database support, improved theming, and more. You could of course make a laborious search on sites, blogs, and many online tutorials that would promise to update you about every new feature, but there's an even better way to know all about Drupal 7's new features: Drupal 7 First Look is the first and only book that covers all of the fantastic new features in Drupal 7 in depth and covers the process of upgrading your Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7. If you've used Drupal 6 and want to use Drupal 7, you need this book.Drupal 7 First Look takes an in-depth look into all of the major new features in Drupal 7 so you can quickly take full advantage of Drupal 7. It also assists you in upgrading your site to Drupal 7. Some of the new features in Drupal 7 include: Fields API, based on Drupal 6 CCK, which allows you to easily build your own content types Improved user interface for administering your website Built-in support for working with images and files Improved security for the site and users of the site Completely rewritten database layer DBTNG to make working with the database easier and more secure. Improved API for custom module development and user interface theming
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Drupal 7 First Look
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Key concepts in DBTNG


There are several key concepts that you need to be aware of when working with DBTNG. Many of these concepts are derived from PDO so if you are familiar with that, you will have no problem transitioning to DBTNG.

Drivers

Drivers in DBTNG are in charge of taking the base statement built by the user and transforming it into a SQL statement that is valid for the database you are working with. Each database type must have a driver built for it to work with Drupal 7. The default installation includes drivers for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Other drivers may be available after release as custom modules or patches.

Drivers are installed in the includes/database directory of your Drupal installation. Each driver is given its own sub-folder, which should be named based on the database name and it should typically only contain lower case letters.

Drivers typically consist of four include files that contain classes which override core database functionality. These include:

  • database...