Creating Our First Module | Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

Using Goodreads Data

So far, we have created a basic module that uses hook_block() to add block content and installed this basic module. As it stands, however, this module does no more than simply displaying a few lines of static text.

In this section, we are going to extend the module's functionality. We will add a few new functions that retrieve and format data from Goodreads.

Goodreads makes data available in an XML format based on RSS 2.0. The XML content is retrieved over HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol), the protocol that web browsers use to retrieve web pages. To enable this module to get Goodreads content, we will have to write some code to retrieve data over HTTP and then parse the retrieved XML.

Our first change will be to make a few modifications to goodreads_block().

Modifying the Block Hook

We could cram all of our new code into the existing goodreads_block() hook; however, this would make the function cumbersome to read and difficult to maintain. Rather than adding significant...

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Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

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Using Goodreads Data

Modifying the Block Hook

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