December 2012
Beginner to intermediate
114 pages
2h 46m
English
Content preview from Programmer's Guide to DrupalBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 2. Drupal Programming Principles
Experienced programmers learn, from training and experience, a set of principles and best practices to apply whenever they approach a problem they want to solve with programming. These include general practices such as "Comment your code" and "Choose clear variable names," which apply to all programming languages and situations, and some that are specific to a particular domain. Drupal has its own set of programming principles (covered in this chapter); learning them and following them should help you be a more effective Drupal programmer.
Note
If you are completely new to Drupal programming, you might find it useful to download the Examples for Developers project from http://drupal.org/project/examples before reading this chapter. Try out the Page and Block examples, and take a look at their source code. Then come back and you’ll have a little more context for learning these principles.
Principle: Drupal Is Alterable
Since Drupal is intended to be used as a platform for building web applications, one of its fundamental principles is that nearly everything about it needs to be customizable, and it needs to be customizable without having to edit its base source code. Since you’re not supposed to need to edit the base code to build any type of web application with Drupal, both Drupal core and contributed modules are (ideally) fully alterable, meaning that they provide hooks that you can use to customize their behavior and output.
The term "hook" ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.