By Wombats

As soon as we get the Ubercart 1.0 release out the door, we're going to dive into converting the entire project to Drupal 6. Drupal 5 has served us well for over a year now, but many features offered by the major API changes/additions (menu, forms, schema) are just too sweet to miss out on when we start making our own Ubercart sites. I know we'll be taking a beating for at least a couple weeks updating all our modules, but ... well, no "but" - it's just going to hurt.

In anticipation of the update, I've decided to dive into module development in Drupal 6 early. As my pilot project, I've started building out a budget module my wife and I can use to monitor our spending through a Drupal site. I'm hoping other people and organizations will find online budget tracking handy, and I'm betting they'll be happy to use Drupal 6 to do it. (How sweet will it be to be able to enter receipts remotely? Your budget won't get torn to shreds when you go on vacation.) After several hours reading d.o, chatting in IRC, and trying everything until my eyes hurt, I'm starting to feel comfortable with the changes.

So, Drupal 5 module developer... what can you expect when you come to Drupal 6? A lot of new, and a bit of confusing. The documentation is still being fleshed out and arranged, so you should be gracious to those posting it up as you try to find that bit of info you need. Overall, it's been pretty helpful, and there are always plenty of examples in Drupal core for just about anything you'll need to do. You can expect to spend a few hours grokking the changes to the menu and forms APIs, even if you were there to see Jeff's ewoks dance in Barcelona. There's just too much going on for folks familiar with the old systems to grasp all the changes in one go. Also, you can expect to spend plenty of time learning to use the new schema API. Here again, I just opened up as many .install files as I could find in core and went to town trying and retrying my own. Just keep reminding yourself that this really is a huge improvement over the old method (or lack thereof) of creating tables!

A few things to look out for that I wasn't expecting and don't know if they're documented:

• It seems truncating cache_menu no longer does the trick when fooling with your menu hooks to get them right. I've kept the modules page open and disabled/re-enabled the module while working on it. Surely someone can point me to a higher path.
• The sequences table is out and auto_increment (and other DB equivalents) are back in. The schema API lets you specify a column's type as 'serial' and takes care of the rest. I got snagged here on a default value in my schema (was copy/pasting...). As far as I know, you should not specify a default value on a serial column. (At least setting it to 0 is going to give you a nice error when it tries to install.)
• All form builder functions are being passed an argument... the catch all $form_state array. Either I missed this in the update notes or it wasn't yet in the right place, but this had me baffled for a bit till I realized that the first parameter passed to your function when you use drupal_get_form() is always going to be $form_state. You should account for this if you're counting on a form receiving any arguments, like this one from my budget.module:
  
  <?php
  function budget_category_form($form_state, $category = NULL) {
    // ...
  }
?>

I also hopped on IRC briefly with my fingers crossed hoping to find someone knowledgeable of the new menu API. I half-heartedly asked if anyone around could help when lo and behold, the Architect himself, chx, waved at me. I leapt for joy (inside, not literally) in my chair and got to chatting. You see, I needed some local tasks to show up only on the edit form of budget nodes, but I was having a hard time restricting them to nodes of that type. I had read in the docs about dynamic argument replacement and thought I might be able to do something with that, and chx showed me how. Joy.

So, the skinny is... menu item paths now accommodate some wildcard action using the handy %. In my menu items, I was able to put in %node_budget with a coordinated load function that checks if a node having an nid equal to the value of %node_budget exists and is of the budget type. If that function returns FALSE (bad nid or not a budget node), then the menu path is a 404 and won't be displayed in the local tasks area of whatever node you're editing. This may sound vague, but check the code and the screenshot. You'll know if you'll never need this information and can go ahead and forget you ever read this paragraph. For everyone else, as soon as I look at the code making this work, I'll be posting this to the menu system docs per chx's request. Thanks again, chx!

So, on a page node, those menu items won't show up in the local tasks area at all. However, on a budget node, you'll see them both and get to further setup your budget node. How cool is that!? See the screenshot below for a visual. Also, unless I'm way off, node_load() caches the node so you needn't worry about superfluous database queries.

So... these are the start of my adventures in Drupal 6. Won't you come adventure with me?

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