Probably the most common use case for view modes is teaser nodes. Or, a node being rendered in the teaser view mode. View modes allow entities to be displayed different depending on context, and also allow other modules like Field API that participate in the entity rendering process to adjust their behavior depending on the requested view mode.
In this lesson we’re going to take a look at an ‘authenticated’ view mode that we can use to adjust the display for any authenticated users. Then we’ll update Entity Controller class and make use of this new view mode in our ::view() method.
NOTE: in the video Joe forgot to change the 'member' label to "Member" and then later in the video when we view it in the UI it is corrected. The sample code included with this video has the correct label.
In this lesson we're going to take a more in-depth look at the UI controller we used earlier to create our administrative UI for the entity. We'll walk through how the controller adds menu paths and the like, without us needing to do any extra work, and then clean up our form-builder functions by overriding the UI controller's method, so that we can gain control of the name of the function that's called.
This lesson takes a look at exposing the data in our entities to views. Lucky for us the entity API handles a lot of this for us. We’ll take a look at what we get for free, using the EntityDefaultViewsController class provided by Entity API module. We'll also discuss ways that we can customize this controller, which we'll tackle in a later lesson.
"There's a module for that."
You've probably heard this before. Many times you can find a module that provides the functionality you need — or at least pretty close to what you need. Drupal's contributed module projects number in the thousands, but what if there isn't a module for your use case? You just might need to build a module for that.
In this series, you will learn about the tools and resources available to Drupal developers, including where to find documentation and what APIs are available to you, both on drupal.org and api.drupal.org. We'll take a look at the Devel module and learn how to use it to inspect the variables, objects, arrays and other things at work under the hood of Drupal 7.
You'll build several different modules that explore and interact with Drupal's various systems and API, including:
- Form API
- Menu system
- Hooks
- Render API
- Theme system
- Database API
Over the course of this series you'll be able to:
- Describe the anatomy of a module
- Implement common hooks
- Write more secure code
- Interact with Drupal's menu system
- Create and alter forms
- Peform CRUD operations on a database
This series starts with the basics and moves you step-by-step to more advanced concepts. Even if you are quite comfortable with PHP but are struggling to understand how to appropriately interact with Drupal 7's API, the lessons in this series can help you develop "The Drupal Way."
Additional resources
In order to make the most of the entity APIs integration with other modules, such as Views, we need to describe the properties of our entity in more detail. The API can infer some information about a property based on our schema but we need to tell it that the integer stored in the updated_at column is actually a timestamp. We will do this by implementing hook_entity_property_info() and describing each of our entities properties. With these definitions in place you will be able to use the formatters in Views much like you would for individual fields on content types provided by core.
Note: Before you implement hook_entity_property_info() the API makes an educated guess about each property but once you've defined a single property, the API expects you to define all of the properties for your entity. Use the .install file in your module to get a complete list of the properties you need to define with hook_property_entity_info. You can also define additional properties that aren't mapped to fields in the database (these can be used for static properties).
Additional resources
If you've done any module development, you're probably familiar with hook_node_view and Drupal's arrays of doom. In this lesson we'll show you how to get easier access to the same information using entity metadata wrappers. We will use the entity_metadata_wrapper function to retrieve a new EntityMetaDataWrapper object that provides an interface for easily accessing an entities property and field values. We'll use the getPropertyInfo method to expose information about individual properties, and the getIterator method to access fields that contain multiple values, such as tags. You'll see that by using meta data wrappers you can also access properties on referenced entities, such as the email address of the author of a node, without having to load that information independently.
Metadata wrappers also provide a consistent way to access properties common to all entities. For example, every entity in Drupal has a unique ID property or a human readable label, but these properties often have different names. User name vs. node title. Metadata wrappers allow you to access this information in a consistent way.
Additional resources
Revisions are an important concept in a content management system. Keeping track of all the edits that have been made to a particular entity over the course of its lifetime. A paper trail or sorts. This lesson takes a look at what is required in order to make our Entities support revisions.
If you've worked with Drupal's node system and enabled revisions then you've seen Drupal's basic revision handling in action. Every time you save a node, it creates a new version of that node. You can roll back to previous versions and keep track of how a piece of content has changed over time. Entity API also supports the concept of revisions and in this lesson we're going to take a look at adding revision support for our video entities.
In order to take advantage of this feature, we'll need to modify our database schema to accommodate storing multiple versions of the same entity. We'll move all fields that we want to make "revisionable" into a separate table and set up a new unique version ID field so that we can keep track of revisions.
Then we will update our hook_entity_info implementation to tell the API that we want to use the revision system and make some changes to the code in our VideoEntityController so that when an entity is updated we save a revision instead of overwriting the current data.
Finally we'll need to write a simple UI for viewing older versions of our video entity because the Entity API does not provide us with this code by default.
In this video we cover a new Drupal 7 feature which lets us create suggestions for theme functions, in addition to suggestions for templates. We'll use this to modify the tags displaying on a node in our site.
Notes:
In the example: $item['#options]['attributes'] += $variables['item_attributes_array'][$delta]; += is a shortcut for array_merge. So it is ensuring the contents of $variables['item_attributes_array'][$delta] are included in $item['#options]['attributes'] so that any class, rdf info or other html attributes are appropriate applied to the tag links. It's possible for any number of modules to set HTML attributes on the tags field in the theme we need to make sure that they get printed out appropriately.
Additional resources
This chapter gives an introduction to how you work with Drupal's renderable, form arrays by adding an image button to the search form. It also walks through the process of adding the necessary classes to a form element so that the image button is properly aligned. The Forms API reference document is a pretty essential reference document for creating and editing forms in Drupal.
Although we use the function dsm() in this video, this should probably be dpm() as that's the preferred function name. The functions dsm() and dpm() are identical.
Additional resources
You can use custom image sizes for automatic display in your Views!
We already know that being able to set a standard for image display creates consistency and a better user experience. It also makes it for easier site administration because you don’t need to cut all of you images before you upload them. Drupal does all the work for you!! Not only can we specify what the image will look like at the node-level, we can also specify what the image will look like in Views.
I am assuming that you already know how to create custom image style presets, and are familiar with the Views module.
For this tutorial, you need to make sure the Image module that comes with Drupal Core is enabled and that you have already downloaded and enabled the Views module along with its prerequisites.
We will use the example of a blog, where we add our scaled images to display in the listing.
Walks through the process of enabling the theme developer module and showing the themer info, which is like Firebug for Drupal theming. You can choose specific elements on the page to see what Drupal template files or theme functions were involved with outputting it to the screen. You can easily look at the candidate template names that are available, as well as see all of the variables that are available from that template file. A list of documented variables can be found within the node module's node.tpl.php file, but sometimes there are undocumented variables that are coming from contributed modules or elsewhere. It's a super handy tool to have available, but only enable it when you really need it since it can adversely affect the mark-up on your page and cause some wonky behavior.
Additional notes:
The Theme Developer module is on Drupal.org at http://drupal.org/project/devel_themer. Once you find a module on Drupal.org, you can see the "machine name" for the module in the URL (it is the same name as is used to for the module's .info file as well). That is the name that Drush uses. So, in this instance, Drush is looking for "devel_themer".
drush dl devel_themer
Additional resources
Shows how to create a theme template suggestion for a specific node type. In this chapter, we create a dynamic template for the article node type by copying the node.tpl.php into a node--article.tpl.php where the 'article' is the machine-readable name for the article content type. We add some specific styling to the node author submission information as well as the date. We also discuss how Drupal looks for the most specific template suggestion (i.e. the node id), then moves to more and more generalized template files like the content type, and then the node.tpl.php as the most general. The Drupal.org documentation page that we look at can be found at http://drupal.org/node/1089656.
Additional notes:
The field_tags variable relates to the corresponding tags field on the article content type. For every field you have on your node the $content variable will contain the rendered content of that node in a key that is the name of the field. So in this case $content['field_tags'] contains all of the tags applied to the node.
Additional resources
This chapter walks through how you can conditionally add either JavaScript or CSS to a content element as well as how to cache the content with Drupal's caching system. Additional notes: The cache will clear the first time cron.php is run AFTER whatever time you've specified as the cache expiration date in your code. Which you could easily calculate to be 30 seconds in the future and then store that timestamp in the database. However, you would also need to make sure that cron was running frequently enough to clear the cache every 30 seconds.
Additional resources
Render Arrays overview (Drupal.org)
In this video Karen will show you how to create a date pop-up on your calendar, using the ColorBox jQuery plugin. She shows how to integrate the plugin with Drupal with the Colorbox module and then how to configure this with the Calendar module. Additional notes: The default display is to show the entity label. You will need to change this to show the complete entity otherwise you'll get a popup with no information in it.
Additional resources
In this lesson we cover a module that comes with Organic Groups called "Organic Groups Context". We cover why this module exists, how it helps build out your groups page, and the way it lends a helping hand building out views to make your Organic Groups that much more powerful.
Note: You must first be a member of the organic group referenced by the node for filtering to work. Under relationships, we've selected "OG membership: OG membership" from Node. So if you're not a member of the group referenced by the node, you will get zero results.
Additional resources
Drupal’s built-in Search module offers powerful, flexible searching features and intelligent ranking of results. Behind the scenes, it’s silently building an index of all the words used in the site’s content. In this lesson we'll:
- Review the Search module settings
- Explain the importance of cron
- Discuss searching with Views
Additional resources
To transform the Product Finder page into a searchable index, we’ll be adding two new filters to the view: one that restricts the results by manufacturer, and another that restricts results to reviews that mention specific words. In this lesson, we'll:
- Add a filter
- Expose a filter
- Set permissions
Additional resources
We’re almost done! The only problem with our view now is that clicking the titles in the view links to Amazon.com instead of to our own website. Fortunately, Views provides a handy trick for just this sort of situation; we can “rewrite” the output of the Title field to create a link back to its referring node instead. In this lesson, we'll:
- Exclude a field from display
- Rewrite the output of a field
Additional resources
You've built the site that Bob and Sarah need to get their reviews going, but as always, there are ways to add more neat features. In this lesson, we'll look at a few modules you can look at adding down the road
- AdSense
- Display Suite
- Blog (core)
- Recipe
Additional resources
We’ve hit all of the major pieces of functionality that Bob and Sarah wanted. In this summary, we'll:
- Tour the Super Duper Chefs site
- Discuss our implementation points
- Review modules and resources