Kevin Orin Williams

When entering the design phase of a project, I tend to kick things off with assembling design inspiration collages and module collages. Skipping that part of the process enables me to get into code very early in the project and code prototypes (I’ll get to those soon), or in other words, design in the browser. If you take some time to explain the way modules work to your clients, they will have a better understanding and appreciation of the design process and the time spent building them. While the code of those modules is not exactly the same in all projects, good chunks of it can be reused, saving me a lot of development time.

Other modules can provide a user interface for managing custom fields via a web browser as well as a wide and flexible variety of data type, form element, and display format capabilities. The administrator (again, via a UI) creates two Field Instances, one attaching the field ‘subtitle’ to the ‘node’ bundle ‘article’ and one attaching the field ‘photo’ to the ‘node’ bundle ‘article’. When the node system uses the Field Attach API to load all fields for an Article node, it passes the node’s entity type (which is ‘node’) and content type (which is ‘article’) as the node’s bundle. Using the Views module, you can fetch content from the database of your site and present it to the user as lists, posts, galleries, tables, maps, graphs, menu items, blocks, reports, forum posts etc.