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

Field API


The new field functionality is an extremely important change in Drupal 7 and the API was heavily modified to support this new functionality. Unfortunately, there is no space in this book to look at each new method in detail due to the sheer number of new hooks and methods within the Field API. Instead, let's look at the major concepts and subsections within the Field API. For a complete reference on the methods defined within the Field API, see: http://api.drupal.org/api/group/field/7.

Entities

Entities represent objects within Drupal that fields can be attached to. Entities must have a controller for them that is a class implementing the DrupalEntityController interface. The controller is responsible for loading entities and handling operations for the entity. Common built-in entities include nodes and users. Additional information about an entity can be defined using hook_entity_info and hook_entity_info_alter. You can react to entities being loaded using hook_entity_load.

Field...