Shane Graham

The Drupal link function or l() function is a handy function you've likely used many times over the years of development. All the way back to Drupal 4.6 (my first version of Drupal) it's been a standard, something I've used so many times I don't even have to think about it. Its ability to correctly handle aliased paths, add an active class and an optional destination, makes it simple to implement yet very useful in just about any Drupal site.

It seems my love for Drupal and its Form API is always expanding, yep, kinda creepy sounding but to a web geek such as myself, it's perfectly normal to love a CMS and its API's!

In building my custom form I required an entity field which is present on user creation. Instead of duplicating the field, grabbing the current value and then saving the new value with an user_save() it's best practice to let Drupal handle the heavy lifting, since we don't want to duplicate tried and tested functionality or have to update the custom field should anything change to the entity field.

The Drupal Subscriptions module notifies users on certain events. Usually when a new piece of content has been either saved or updated. Users can subscribe to specific nodes, terms or entire content types allowing them to keep up with the changes on the site. It's a great module.

In a previous Drupal developer blog post, I discussed leveraging Ajax with Drupal's Form API. In this post we'll cover an alternative method in displaying dynamic content to your user - using Drupal's form states (conditional fields).

Having a query builder like Views at your fingertips is fantastic on so many levels. I'm not going to get into my deep and semi-weird love affair with Views at this point in time, but I will show you how to programmatically display your Views display in code. This can be useful in a custom module, perhaps in a hook_node_view or maybe in one of your node or page templates.

In this example I'll add my View to my blog nodes. I'll just append my View to the bottom of the blog content. We'll want to use the views_embed_view() function to render our desired View display.