Drupal 7 Module Development

Drupal 7 Module Development

By : Matt Butcher, Larry Garfield, John Wilkins, Matt Farina, Ken Rickard, Greg Dunlap

Buy this Book

Drupal 7 Module Development

By: Matt Butcher, Larry Garfield, John Wilkins, Matt Farina, Ken Rickard, Greg Dunlap

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Drupal is an award-winning open-source Content Management System. It's a modular system, with an elegant hook-based architecture, and great code. Modules are plugins for Drupal that extend, build or enhance Drupal core functionality. In Drupal 7 Module development book, six professional Drupal developers use a practical, example-based approach to introduce PHP developers to the powerful new Drupal 7 tools, APIs, and strategies for writing custom Drupal code. These tools not only make management and maintenance of websites much easier, but they are also great fun to play around with and amazingly easy to use. If you're eager to learn about these new APIs and start creating modules for Drupal 7, this is your book. Walk through the development of complete Drupal modules with this primer for PHP programmers. From basic modules and themes to sophisticated Drupal extensions, learn how to use Drupal's API and hook system to build powerful custom Drupal websites. With an emphasis on practical programming, this book takes a project-based approach, providing working examples in every chapter Specifically written for Drupal 7, this book will get you coding modules as quickly as possible, and help you add the features that will give your work that professional gloss! This book will walk you through the development of complete Drupal modules and show you how to add various features to meet your requirements. The Drupal content management system, written in the popular PHP language, has skyrocketed in popularity. Developers for this system are in high demand. This book prepares PHP developers for Drupal development, explaining architecture, exploring APIs, and emphasizing practical approaches. In each chapter, readers will learn new aspects of the system while creating fully-functioning modules, themes, and libraries. Learn how to “hook into” any part of the Drupal process, creating custom content types, extending existing capabilities, and integrating with external services and applications.

Drupal 7 Module Development

Credits

Foreword

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Developing for Drupal 7

Introducing Drupal (for developers)

Drupal architecture

Drupal's major subsystems

Tools for developing Drupal code

Summary

Creating Your First Module

Our goal: a module with a block

Creating a new module

Working with the Block API

Writing automated tests

Summary

Drupal's Theme Layer

Business logic versus presentation logic

Summary

Theming a Module

Reusing a default theme implementation

Steps to build a default theme implementation

Summary

Building an Admin Interface

The User Warn module

Starting our module

The Drupal menu system

Form API

Sending mail with drupal_mail() and hook_mail()

The token system

Summary

Working with Content

Why create your own entities

Bundles

Summary

Creating New Fields

Our goal: a "dimensions" field

How Field API works

Creating our new field type

Exposing fields to the Form API with widgets

Using formatters to display our field

Managing non-Field fields

Finding entities and fields

Summary

Drupal Permissions and Security

Using user_access() to assert permissions

Checking the proper user account

Using hook_permission()

Declaring your own access functions

Responding when access is denied

Enabling permissions programmatically

Defining roles programmatically

Securing forms in Drupal

Handling AJAX callbacks securely

Summary

Node Access

Node Access compared to user_access() and other permission checks

Using hook_node_access()

When to write a node access module

Creating the role access module

Modifying the behavior of other modules

Testing and debugging your module

Summary

JavaScript in Drupal

JavaScript inside Drupal

Adding JavaScript

Altering JavaScript

Drupal specific JavaScript

AJAX helpers

Summary

Working with Files and Images

The Twitpic and watermark modules

Summary

Installation Profiles

Introducing installation profiles

Drupal distributions

Creating profiles

Running the installer from the command line

Summary

Database Access

Summary

Security

Thinking securely

Filtering versus escaping

Node access control

Handling insecure code

Staying up to date

Summary

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Using formatters to display our field

Now that we've defined our field type, and we've created a widget to make it editable from a form, the only piece left is to decide how to display it in user output. (User output usually means the computer screen, but it could also mean an RSS feed, printed page, or various other types of output). Drupal lets us control that display using formatters.

Formatters follow a very similar pattern to field types and widgets. There is an info hook to define what formatters are available, and then there's a series of callbacks for all of the formatters our module defines. In most cases though, there's only one callback we need worry about.

Declaring a formatter

First, let's look at the info hook given here:

function dimfield_field_formatter_info() {
  return array(
    'dimfield_default' => array(
      'label' => t('Default'),
      'field types' => array('dimensions'),
    ),
    'dimfield_table' => array(
      'label' => t('Show as table'),
  ...

Drupal 7 Module Development

By : Matt Butcher, Larry Garfield, John Wilkins, Matt Farina, Ken Rickard, Greg Dunlap

Drupal 7 Module Development

By: Matt Butcher, Larry Garfield, John Wilkins, Matt Farina, Ken Rickard, Greg Dunlap

Overview of this book

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Drupal 7 Module Development

Using formatters to display our field

Declaring a formatter