Creating a simple module

Whole books are written about Drupal module development. This chapter is just a brief introduction to a very complex subject, to get you started.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Final word

Introduction

This chapter is based upon Matt Butcher: Learning Drupal 6 Module Development. The full text (MS Word) is in the subdirectory goodreads.

This chapter outlines how to create a simple Drupal 7 module. We shall make use of an existing web service to pull in some XML data, format it, and display it as a block in the site's layout. These topics will be covered:

• Creating the .info and .module files.
• Creating a new module.
• Using basic hooks.
• Installing and configuring the module.
• Using some important Drupal functions.

You can download the code of this project from Drupal.org:

$ git clone --branch 7.x-1.x http://git.drupal.org/sandbox/gisleh/2226115.git inf5272
cd inf5272 

The code is in the subdirectory goodreads.

This particular module will fetch XML-data from the website http://www.goodreads.com and display it in a block on our site. It does not interact with the database, so there is no need for an .install-file to set up a schema.

Final word

[TBA]

---

Last update: 2013-02-23 [gh].