This lesson will explore the use of EntityFieldQuery to retrieve lists of entities from Drupal without directly querying the database which can be problematic in a system where the underlying schema can change depending on configuration settings in the user interface. Again focusing on writing code that will work with any entity in Drupal and isn't hard coded to your particular setup.

Additional resources

EntityFieldQuery documentation

Entities were introduced in Drupal 7 as a way of taking the things that people loved about nodes + CCK in Drupal 6 and applying them to other types of data like users, comments, and taxonomy terms. The Entity API in Drupal 7 provides a set of common functions and classes to make it easier for developers to create their own custom entity types or to work with existing ones in a generic way. The API in Drupal core however is still missing some really useful tools and is supplemented by the Entity module in Drupal contributed which we'll make heavy use of throughout the series.

In this series we'll learn about the interplay between Entities, Entity Types, Bundles, and Fields and how to write custom code to deal with each of these things. The Entity API demo site files that we use in this series are all located in the Lullabot GitHub, as well as in zip files attached to the respective video pages, under the Downloads tab.

This series covers:

• What entities are and how they fit into the Drupal ecosphere
• EntityFieldQuery
• Entity classes, what they do and how to override them
• Providing an admin UI for adding/editing and deleting entities from Drupal
• Making entities fieldable
• View modes
• Creating custom UI's for dealing with entities
• Describing entity properties to Drupal
• Views integration for entities
• Entity Metadata wrappers
• Making entities revisionable

And much much more. This series assumes that you're already familiar with the basic tenets 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 might want to brush up by watching our Module Development for Drupal 7 first.

Additional resources

Entity API Demo site files on GitHub
Entity module at Drupal.org

This lesson takes a look at working with the already existing entities in Drupal such as users and nodes and demonstrates some best practices for working with them in your own custom module. We'll focus on writing code that will work with any entity type and isn't hard coded to work with just nodes or just entities.

Additional notes:
There is a typo in the video. Joe created the variable $types = 'comment'; in one spot and then used it as entity_load($type, ... which obviously wouldn't work because the later is missing an 's' on the end. The downloadable code for this video doesn't have the typo.

Additional resources

Entity API demos on GitHub

In this lesson Joe will explain what an entity is and provide a little bit of history about how they came into being. We’ll also learn about some of the differences between custom entities and nodes (which happen to be a type of entity) and when, and why you might want to choose to write your own custom entities instead of using the node system or a more traditional datastore.

In this tutorial we're going to use the git bisect command to do a little bit of debugging. We're all human, and sometimes bugs get introduced our software and we may not notice them for a while. Especially on fast moving projects. A good example of this would be a performance regression, and now you want to figure out what commit made everything run slower all of a sudden. Bisect allows us to do a binary search between a known good commit and a known bad commit and quickly narrow down which commit introduced the problem. From there it's much easier to figure out what exactly the problem is and fix it.

GitHub is a great, free service that lets you share your Git repositories online with others. In this tutorial, Blake gives a quick tour of our Git Series Example GitHub project, and then explains how pull requests work, letting you merge changes into the repository through the UI. Feel free to try it out by adding jokes to our new jokes.txt file!

We've now learned about all sorts of commands in git and the flags that accompany those commands. We've also seen that some of those commands can get to be a bit long and are used quite often. In this lesson we're going to take a look at how to create command aliases in our .gitconfig file so that we can have a shorthand for accessing some of these more esoteric commands. We'll also take a quick tour of Joe's personal .gitconfig file that he uses in his day-to-day work.

This tutorial takes a look at applying a patch from Drupal.org to your local copy of a module or Drupal core using Git. Afterwards we'll look at how you can create your own patches, using git diff and git format-patch, in order to contribute code back to Drupal or any of the module's on Drupal.org. You can see a full Git workflow using GitHub in the lesson Git Workflow: Putting It All Together.

Additional resources

Git Best Practices: Upgrading the Patch Process article
Applying a patch in a feature branch

In this tutorial, Joe walks you through a typical Git workflow. We start with cloning a repository, creating a branch, and getting some work done. Then we go ahead and commit our work, merge it into the master branch, and push our changes back up to the remote repository.

This tutorial takes a look at using the git stash commands to temporarily preserve your work when you need to incorporate other changes but aren't quite ready to fully commit them.

This lesson is all about making two git repositories talk to one another. So far everything we've done has been on your desktop. But we're going to need a way to share changes with other people on our team, or deploy them to our production site. To do that we're going to learn about the git clone, push, pull and fetch commands.

It happens to the best of us, sometimes we commit something that just simply wasn't ready, or maybe we're having a bad day and introduced a bug to the code. I've even seen scenarios where you've created a temporary workaround in your codebase and now you're ready to remove that workaround and put in a real fix. This lesson looks at using the git revert command to deal with these scenarios by creating new commits that reverse the changes of a previous commit.

In this tutorial, we'll take a look at ways that you can remove changes that you've made to the files in your working tree, how to remove something from the index that you've added but later decided that you're not ready to commit, and some other basic working tree and index house cleaning commands.

In this tutorial, we revisit the git commit command and take a look at some of the additional things you can do with it, like amending a previous commit, and creating commits using shorthand methods. Then we'll look at using the interactive rebase command which will allow us to reword commit message and do other things like squash two commits into a single commit when performing a rebase.