Theming Modules | Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

A Simple Database Lookup

The philquotes_block() hook calls the _philquotes_get_quote()function to get content for display. The _philquotes_get_quote() function is considered a private (module only) function, since it begins with the underscore character.

The task of this private function will be to return a single quote content item from the database. Quotes are stored as nodes. To add some spice to our module, we'll get a random quote node rather than progressing sequentially through the quotes.

The process of retrieving our content item can be broken down into two steps:

1. We need to get the node ID of the random quote we are going to display.
2. We need to retrieve the node's data, specifically the title (which contains the quote's origin) and the body (which holds the text of the quote).

To accomplish these tasks, we will use the Drupal API on two levels. To get a random node ID, we will have to write some simple (but low-level) SQL. Once we have that, though, we can use a higher-level...

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Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

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A Simple Database Lookup

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