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Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

By : Matt Butcher

4.3 (16)

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

4.3 (16)

By: Matt Butcher

Overview of this book

This book is written for PHP developers who want to add custom features to Drupal. You will need to know the basics of PHP and MySQL programming, but no experience of programming Drupal is required, although you will be expected to be familiar with the basic operation of Drupal.

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

Credits

Credits

About the Author

About the Author

About the Reviewers

About the Reviewers

Preface

Preface

Free Chapter

Introduction to Drupal Modules

Introduction to Drupal Modules

Drupal's Architecture

Crucial Drupal Concepts

Developers' Tools

A Word on Our Demonstration Site

Summary

Creating Our First Module

Creating Our First Module

Starting Out

A Basic .module File

Installing a Module

Using Goodreads Data

Finishing Touches: hook_help()

Summary

The Theme System

The Theme System

The Theme System's Architecture

Creating a Custom Theme

Summary

Theming Modules

Theming Modules

Our Target Module: What We Want

Creating a Custom Content Type

The Foundations of the Module

A Simple Database Lookup

Theming Inside a Module

Overriding the Default Theme from a Theme

Summary

Using JavaScript and AJAX/JSON in Modules

Using JavaScript and AJAX/JSON in Modules

Picking up Where We Left Off

Introducing jQuery

Writing a Drupal AJAX/JSON Service

Summary

An Administration Module

An Administration Module

The emailusers Module

The Beginning of the Module

Registering an Administration Page

Handling Forms with the Forms API (FAPI)

Sending Mail with the Mail API

Incorporating the Module into Administration

Summary

Building a Content Type

Building a Content Type

The biography Module

The Content Creation Kit

The Starting Point

The Module Installation Script

Correlating the New Table with Nodes

The Content Creation Form

Access Controls

Database Hooks

Hooks for Getting Data

Theming Biography Content

Summary

Filters, Actions, and Hooks

Filters, Actions, and Hooks

The sitenews Module

Getting Started

A Simple Content Type, Defined in Code

Creating Filters and an Input Format

The Beginning of an Action

Defining a Hook

Completing the Action: Theming and Mailing

Adding a Trigger

Summary

An Installation Profile

An Installation Profile

Introducing Installation Profiles

Setting up a Distribution

Programming Profiles

The .profile Script

The Installation Task System

Packaging the Distribution

Summary

Summary

In this chapter we created our first module. We created our first .info and .module files. We implemented our first two hooks, hook_block() and hook_help(). We installed our module, and then went on to extend the module to access an outside XML source for content.

We also looked at several important Drupal functions, with t(), l(), watchdog(), and check_plain() being the most important functions of the bunch.

In the coming chapters, we will build on the concepts covered in this chapter. Next, we will turn to the theming system to learn how to cleanly separate layout and styling information from the rest of the code.

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83

Tech Concepts

36

Programming languages

73

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