Creating a Custom Drupal Module

I had a little practice learning how to create a custom module for Drupal CMS this week, and I would like to take this opportunity to share this experience with the rest of the world.



Fortunately for us, Drupal provides comprehensive tutorial for creating a custom module here:

http://drupal.org/developing/modules

Though it may seem to you that there is a lot to do here (which is true), it is always a good idea to walk through the tutorial so that you get a general idea of the process of creating your own module. If you are like me, and just want to hurry up and see a module in action, I suggest that you simply copy and paste the code to respective files and place them under the correct directory. I will explain this process more in detail below.

A simple Drupal module needs at least three files: .module, .info and .install files. The .module file, to put it in simple terms, defines the function of the module. It is also where the majority of the codes are located. The .info is a small file that contain metadata information about the modules and themes. Typically the contents of .info files look somewhat like this:

; $Id$
name = "Example module"
description = "Gives an example of a module."
core = 6.x

The above is an example taken from Drupal's tutorial. The name and description fields are required fields. The core field should indicate the version number of your Drupal installation. Drupal 6.x version is used for this example.

Last but not least, you must write your .install file. This file basically contains initial set up codes that are run once while installing the module. Typically (depending on the type of module), this file contains about a dozen lines of SQL query commands that creates the necessary tables in your database.

Overall, creating your custom Drupal module is not an easy task. I hope that the above information helps you to get a general idea. I will certainly post a more detail information once I make further progress with my project.