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

Chapter 7. Drupal 7 for Developers

In the last chapter, we looked at the new DBTNG layer for Drupal 7, which controls how you interact with databases in Drupal. DBTNG is arguably the biggest and most important change for developers in Drupal 7. However, there are also numerous other changes that affect how module developers will interact with the system.

In this chapter, we will take a look at all of the key changes to the Drupal API. We will start by looking at the .info file changes that are required to make custom modules function properly as well as changes to the API related to getting information about modules. Next, we will look into changes related to the Drupal core system. After this, we will examine changes to the menu system before moving onto changes to the Form API and file uploads. Following the file handling APIs, we will consider the new Field API from a developer's perspective. We will wrap up by checking out changes to other areas including:

  • Searching

  • Tokens

  • Triggers and Actions...