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

Form API changes


Now that we have reviewed the changes to the menu system, let's look at changes to the Form API. There are several new methods in Drupal 7 that make it easier to work with Drupal forms as well as making forms more powerful.

New Form API hooks

The Form API has several new hooks that allow you to influence the building and display of forms.

hook_element_info

hook_element_info()

This hook allows you to define additional element types that should become available for use within the Form API. The return value of this API is an associative array containing information about the element to be defined. For a complete list of keys that should be provided, see the online documentation at: http://api.drupal.org/api/function/hook_element_info/7.

This hook is derived from the Drupal 6 hook_elements method. If you used hook_elements in your Drupal 6 modules, you can convert the module to use hook_element_info in Drupal 7.

hook_element_info_alter

hook_element_info_alter(&$type)

This hook is...