Being a well-greased part of the Drupal Machine

Being a well-greased part of the Drupal Machine

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This session is an overview of some of the most powerful points of integration for modules in the Drupal machine. It's aimed at anyone who's developing modules for Drupal, weather they're public projects on d.o or custom modules for a private project. The goal is to give you a new set of tools for leveraging some of the most powerful features and subsystems in Drupal, and to provide all the information you need to learn more on your own.

We'll will start out with a short recap of some basics principles and methods for developing Drupal modules:

• Don't reinvent the wheel – keep to standard solutions and extend them.
• Concepts: implementing hooks, inheriting classes etc.
• Know your core APIs: forms, blocks, nodes, theme functions, etc.
  • New in D7: fields, tokens, queues, batches etc.
• Use standard solutions in contrib, like CCK, Views, Rules, Token, Services, Drupal Queue, Flag, Session API.
• Learn the art of _alter()ing.

We'll then move on to an overview of some of the most useful features that you can tap into with your module. This will give you a good idea about what APIs are available, which ones are particularly useful to you, and where to find out more about each of them:

• CCK widgets and formatters.
• Exposing data to Views.
• Creating a web API with Services.
• Defining new Tokens.
• Events, conditions and actions in Rules.
• Context: conditions and reactions.
• Ctools:
  • Making your configuration exportable.
  • A plugin system for your module.
  • Convenient AJAX tools.
  • Working more efficiently with forms.

In the last part of the session we'll dive into a couple of examples of how to implement some of these APIs. Looking at some real world implementations and seeing how it all fits together will give you some hands-on experience and make you well equipped for learning other APIs on your own.

The last 15 minutes will be used for questions and discussion.

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