Drupal 7

Accelerate your development process using Drupal 8 Views through this advanced, practical guide.

Key features

• A practical, step-by-step guide with illustrative examples to give you a clear understanding of Drupal 8 views
• Get the only book on the market that talks about Drupal 8 views and their importance for developers
• Get an understanding of how views work and how they help to create modular applications

Topic and description

Learn how to build complex displays of content—all without programming.

Views was used on more than 80% of all Drupal 7 sites; now it is part of the Drupal 8 core. While many site builders and site owners are aware of Views, they don't understand how to take full advantage of its power to create many amazing pages and blocks. If they are using Views, they might build 10 different view displays with different filters, without knowing that a contextual filter would require only a single display.

Using our sample company, we'll take its existing content and evolve an ever more complex and powerful website for that company, starting with adapting the administration the user sees and moving on to making complex pages of information for site visitors.

While the book is written for Drupal 8, the similarities between Views in Drupal 7 and 8 make this a useful reference for Drupal 7 site builders also.

What you will learn

• Create displays of content that are automatically updated when you add new content
• Show maps and rotating image carousels on your site
• Combine content to create composite displays using the same data in different ways
• Use fields from more than one content type to create powerful views of multi-table data
• Modify the field data being displayed, combining it in different ways or changing the HTML that might be normally generated
• Add headers and footers above and below a views display
• Make the output of your view look exactly as the designer specifies
• Change the order in which a list of content is displayed, and limit the content shown to certain content types or values
• Filter content using values passed to the view in the URL, making a single view work in different ways

What you will learn from this book

• Manipulate and utilize comment, file, field collection, node, term, user, and vocabulary entities
• Attach, manipulate, and utilize date, file, image, link, number, text, and term reference fields
• Write type-agnostic code dealing with more types of Drupal data than ever before
• Upgrade a legacy Drupal node module to expose and utilize entities
• Expose your legacy database tables as fully-fledged Drupal entities
• Batch import remote data and expose them as entities
• Glean good coding practices for dealing with entities

In Detail

Writing code for manipulating Drupal data has never been easier! Learn to dice and serve your data as you slowly peel back the layers of the Drupal entity onion. Next, expose your legacy local and remote data to take full advantage of Drupal's vast solution space.

Programming Drupal 7 Entities is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a thorough knowledge of Drupal's entity paradigm and a number of clear step-by-step exercises, which will help you take advantage of the real power that is available when developing using entities.

This book looks at the Drupal 7 entity paradigm, and breaks down the mystery and confusion that developers face when building custom solutions using entities. It will take you through a number of clear, practical recipes that will help you to take full advantage of Drupal entities in your web solutions without much coding.

You will also learn how to expose local and remote data to give your legacy data new life as fully-fledged Drupal entities that can be used by other modules such as views, rules, and so on. In addition to this, you'll learn to create, retrieve, update, and delete (CRUD) entities, their properties and fields, along with some programmatic wizardry to manipulate complex entities such as field collections. If you want to develop quickly and easily using Drupal entities, then this is the book for you.

You will learn everything you need to know to develop code and expose data using entities in Programming Drupal 7 Entities.

Approach

The book follows a standard tutorial-based approach to create, retrieve, update, and delete Drupal 7 entities, their properties and fields.

Who this book is for

Programming Drupal 7 Entities is perfect for intermediate or advanced developers new to Drupal entity development who are looking to get a good grounding in how to code using the new paradigm. It’s assumed that you will have some experience in PHP development already, and being vaguely familiar with Drupal, GIT, and Drush will also help.