New Series: Working with Entities in Drupal 7

This week we are kicking off a brand new series, Working with Entities in Drupal 7. Entities were introduced in Drupal 7, and are an extremely useful tool, though they have been somewhat confusing for people to work with. In this series we will start out by explaining what entities are, in addition to things like bundles, fields, and entity types. We then spend time understanding how you can use the Entity API to work with existing Drupal entities in you own custom module work. With that foundation in place, we will create a new custom entity and talk about when and why you may, or may not, want to do that.

To get things started off we will cover some terminology and history, with a free video, and then begin working with entity_load() and the EntityFieldQuery class to work with existing Drupal entities on your system.

• Introduction to Working with Entities in Drupal 7 Series (FREE)
• What are Drupal Entities? (FREE)
• Work with Existing Drupal Entities
• Make Lists of Entities with EntityFieldQuery

This series assumes that you're already familiar with the basic tennents of writing modules for Drupal and makes use of things like hook_menu() without spending time explaining them. If you're not familiar with Drupal module development, you should brush up by watching our Module Development for Drupal 7 first.