guybrush's blog

Field get items

Submitted by guybrush on

Here's a useful one you may not know about: field_get_items().  Basically, if you're trying to get field values off an entity, it can be fiddly - dealing with language, indices, etc.  This function makes it much simpler. Just give it the Entity Type (e.g. 'node'), the entity itself and the field name (e.g. 'body'), and it will return the value that you are looking for.

Font your face

Submitted by guybrush on

In days gone by, providing custom fonts on a Drupal website was somewhat problematic.  Now, in Drupal 7, things are much easier due to the rather intimidatingly named @font-your-face module.  This is very easy to set up and apply to CSS elements on your site, and integrates with a good number of external font libraries like the one provided by Google, or upload your own fonts.

Rewarding website activity using Simple Contest

Submitted by guybrush on

There are a number of modules designed encourage and reward activity on a Drupal website.  One that looks interesting is Simple Contest.  What this does is give some kind of a reward to the winning user (or node) who meets the conditions met for the particular contest.  For example, there may be a contest (which is defined by create a node of a contest-supporting content type) which runs for 3 weeks, and the winner is the user who created the most content, rated the most content, created the most comments, etc.  Or the winner might be

How to create a Drupal website in 180 seconds

Submitted by guybrush on

There is, of course, my Youtube video on How to create a website in 90 seconds, but if you want to make a Drupal website, you can do it in about 180 seconds using the Quickstart project (http://drupal.org/project/quickstart).  After installing VirtualBox and the Ubuntu image, you can create a Drupal site using:

drush quickstart-create --domain=mydrupalsite.com

Using Rules to send out emails

Submitted by guybrush on

One of the most powerful contributed modules available in Drupal 7 (and Drupal 6) is Rules (http://drupal.org/project/rules).  The following exports are rules I have created to send out email notifications after saving content to everyone who has indicated they want these notifications in a custom field added to the user account.  If it works, you'll receive an email very shortly!

Component action rule:

Entity metadata wrappers

Submitted by guybrush on

I recommend the use of Entity API for a number of reasons.  One reason is the Entity metadata wrapper.  Although I haven't actually used this, I can see its benefits, and plan to use it soon.  The Drupal Commerce set of modules makes extensive use of this.

What is allows is chainable access to all the properties of an entity.  For example, if you have a node, and wanted to find the node author's email address and change it, you could do this as follows:

How to query a field on an entity in Drupal 7

Submitted by guybrush on

With Drupal 7's support for Field API, even the die-hard opponents of old-style CCK will find themselves using fields, and (hopefully) entities.  But...how do you run a query efficiently on a field which could have multiple values?

The answer lies in EntityFieldQuery.  Here are some examples of how it can be used:

$query = new EntityFieldQuery();

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