building modules

This series of 8 videos will walk you through the process of starting to develop a real Drupal module. Most of what the videos cover are techniques for accomplishing the process.

Komodo is the PHP debugger I use on the Mac. There are others which work well too, such as Eclipse. Once you have Xdebug installed then it's just a matter of making sure the right port is used for intercepting the debugging call.

There's an easy way to start the learning process of using a debugger for PHP. You don't have to know how to compile Xdebug (at least if you're on a Mac).

The Devel module is a SUPER CRITICAL module which you need to use if you're even considering developing within Drupal.

One of the key elements to knowing what is going on while you develop your module is watching what happens. Using a debugger isn't the only way to see exactly what is going on. You also need to know how to watch the logs of the web server, php and the database. Just remember tail -f is your friend.

Knowing how to search within the code of a project is what helps you learn any system faster. When you know where you want something to show up (in the browser) then finding where that code exists is the best way to start tackling your solution.

The best way, I find, for learning is to look at what exists and then pick and pull from those examples to accomplish what you want. Overtime, you end with the skills you need to create stuff from scratch.

An 18 minute video about REALLY researching existing code for modules. I reference a number of methods to do your research.

A quick discussion about choosing your coding editor. I discuss a few items about TextMate and BBEdit. On the windows side, I mention UltraEdit.

This video is a quick overview of what will be covered by the other videos about building a Drupal module.