From LCA2010

Contents 1 Drupal Under the Hood 1.1 Prerequisites 1.2 Example files 1.3 Handouts

Drupal Under the Hood

Drupal is a content management system / content management framework used to power hundreds of thousands of sites around the world, including Ubuntu.com and Whitehouse.gov.

This tutorial will provide a crash-course for developers on how Drupal's insides work and how to write modules to extend its default behaviour. The focus is on the forthcoming Drupal 7 release.

Prerequisites

To get the most out of this tutorial, you should bring a laptop with the following:

• Drupal 7 alpha 1: http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.0-alpha1.tar.gz, which in turn requires PHP 5.2+ with PDO support.
• Devel module: http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/devel-7.x-1.x-dev.tar.gz

Note that Drupal 7 is still in development. Stuff tends to work great on a standard LAMP stack of Apache 2, MySQL 5, and PHP 5.2. It should also work with SQLite and PostgreSQL databases, web servers other than Apache, and PHP 5.3; however, you may run into weird bugs. If so, thank you for alpha testing Drupal 7! :) Please tell us about them: http://drupal.org/project/issues/drupal

Example files

• Example files: http://webchick.net/files/lca-drupal-tutorial.zip

Since there's a lot of material to cover in a very short period of time, we'll have to have to sort of whip through these examples. But fear not; they are broken down step-by-step, and a heavily annotated version of the final module will be provided if you miss anything.

Handouts

(coming soon)