Background to Drupal entities

Introduction

The first of a series of related posts about Drupal custom entities, all will be linked into here as they are published. If not useful in themselves I hope to at least provide lots of links to useful entity resources online.

Entities were introduced into Drupal 7, they fundamentally change the way you can deal with things in Drupal and pave the way for some vast improvements in the use of Drupal as a development framework (rather than a CMS with customizable bits and modules that can be bolted on).

Entities are not proving easy for people to get into, although embraced by a number of contributed modules, many working Drupal developers don't fully understand or use them and although there are plenty of resources and explanations about them it is not easy to get started using them.

I believe that a key factor in the small number of developers embracing entities is that they are not directly exposed to site builders in Drupal 7, there is no sliding scale of entity use in core, you have to know about how they work and get your hands dirty.

Mastery of Entities may have been 'Take it or leave it' for a lot of developers building Drupal sites in Drupal 7 but I think for Drupal 8 they will be vital knowledge for anybody building medium to large Drupal sites.

Shoddy Drupal security advice from stopthehacker.com

Getting back into twitter and quickly encountering some of the things I dislike about the current social media and information saturation: shoddy content pushed out merely for traffic purposes and that thinly disguised advertising.
This article 10 Simple steps to protect your Drupal site is bad, bad, BAD. Apart from the fact that there is no distinction between upgrade and update (are you really going to do all that just to update a module?) there is some lame advice about file permissions (755 is more secure than 644 really???).

New WordPress blog on the way

I started blogging about language learning many years ago (about seven I think), at the time using a service like Blogger was the path of least resistance, I was working on publishing platforms for online Journals and magazines and didn't at work, at home I wanted to learn languages not more of the same.

Now I feel a need to have an online presence that represents me centrally on the web and I want to control that rather than being enslaved to an online service. I have had (although my name is Christopher David Hall I always associate the full 'Christopher' as being in trouble as that is the only time anyone calls me that) for some time now but put nothing there.