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Why Drupal module developers should be excited about object-oriented hooks

It's not super-often that a Drupal core change record stops me in my tracks, but recently, one did exactly that. With so much of Drupal core written using modern, object-oriented PHP, there was still one place where we needed to use plain-old PHP functions: hook implementations. Drupal hooks have been with us since before I started with Drupal (over 18 years ago,) and I had long hoped that with the advent of "modern" Drupal (Drupal 8+,) eventually hooks would be converted over to Symfony events. Much to my surprise, a recent change record for Drupal 11.x-dev (to be included in

I need to change the number of items returned by a view, based on the theme!

A friend recently came to me with the following question:

I have a site that has a mode optimized for low-bandwidth use. Can I change the number of rows returned by a view based on the theme?

The Views 2 API has a function called hook_views_query_alter() which allows you to modify the View object before it pulls the results from the database.

In order to use views hooks, you must create a module that registers itself as using the Views API:

Can't set Page Title inside hook_preprocess_page? Hack it!

Read more about Can't set Page Title inside hook_preprocess_page? Hack it!

If your client is being very picky about the titles of certain pages, especially views, you may find yourself needing to write some code to set the title at the theme level. This is normally fine, since Drupal 6 has some great hooks, like hook_preprocess_page() and its cousins for blocks, nodes, and user profiles.