Training

Our next U.S. stop:

Mike Anello and Andrew Riley from Mediacurrent are teaming up to offer the first Blue Collar Git workshop on Friday, June 8 as part of DrupalCamp Charlotte (also part of the Southeast LinuxFest). The cost is only $149 for the full day if you register during the month of May ($199 otherwise). 

New Podcast

Posted Wednesday, May 9 at 7:50 am
Brandon Morrison (Brandonian on drupal.org) joins Andrew Riley and Mike Anello on the first post-DrupalCon Denver edition of the podcast to talk about all things Geo in Drupal 7. Brandon is one of the maintainers of the GeoField module and is an active member of the Drupal Geo community.
Download Podcast 82
DrupalEasy_ep82_20120509.mp3
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Module Development: Understanding Wildcard Loader Arguments

When writing a module from scratch (or trying to deconstruct one to figure out how it works), it might save you some time to be aware of "wildcard loader arguments" when using hook_menu(). These wildcard arguments are automatically linked with "_load()" functions that allow the module developer to load data into the argument anytime the menu item is called.

Here's a quick example of what I'm talking about. Look at this snippet from the Quicktabs module's quicktabs_menu() function:


$items['admin/build/quicktabs/%quicktabs/edit'] = array(
'title' => 'Edit QT block',
'page callback' => 'drupal_get_form',
'page arguments' => array('quicktabs_form', 'edit', 3),
'access arguments' => array('administer quicktabs'),
'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
'file' => 'includes/admin.inc',
);

The "%quicktabs" wildcard automatically calls the "quicktabs_load()" function whenever this menu item is called (if the wildcard was named "%pickles" then it would call "pickles_load()"). What this means is that while just the ID of the quicktabs block is passed in via the URL, the quicktabs_load() function takes this ID and populates the full quicktabs array that is then passed to the "quicktabs_form" function. Since this all happens automatically, there's no paper trail (and therefore can be a bit confusing) to see how exactly the $quicktabs variable gets populated.

More info on these "Wildcard Loader Arguments" is available on Drupal.org.

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