I'm very excited with my learning progress. Thank you Chris!
Just wanted to express my gratitude. Subscribing to these tutorials has been the best investment in time and money that I've made this year! I've been practicing and following along your tutorials and and i'm feeling more and more like a Drupal expert.
I'm a PHP newbie and I've been studying the fundamentals of PHP in general for months. Learning to develop for Drupal 7 has helped me practice and understand the PHP language. Drupal's APIs abstract a lot of things but there is always a point in a module that you have to use plain PHP to accomplish some tasks. That combination has been very helpful for me. The thing i love most about Drupal is that its a great Web Content Management Framework that i can build on top off and extend without having to start from scratch.
Just to challenge myself, i added some functionality to the Trails module. I added some functions that store the time a user spent on a page and displays it in hours minutes and seconds. This is a bit different from the "You visited X seconds ago" already displayed in the module. I leveraged the trails_history_fetch() function to get the last two pages visited and calculate the difference in seconds between the previous timestamp and the current time with REQUEST_TIME. It was very exciting to learn to use the Database API to store the results!.
Also, i learned to access data on stdClass objects wich is a bit different from accessing data on Array objects (that was confusing at first). Learning to setup and use xDebug on Komodo IDE was an invaluable tool to learn, troubleshoot and develop faster.
When i polish the code a bit more, maybe i'll share it here. I'm feeling confident that with a few more months of practice, i'll be able to tackle almost anything when developing new functionality with modules.
Thanks Chris, and congrats for creating such a great service.
It great to read that, as a almost PHP newbie, we can become a Drupal Developer. I'm a Drupal integrator, but the first three chapters I followed where not that easy.
So thanks @obrignoni for the message, I'll go on.
I wanted to swing by and congratulate Chris on a great job with the D7 series. I'm a professional Drupal developer and this is the best video instruction I've found. It really has saved me a lot of time I would have spent looking through the always incomplete d.o. docs not to mention the blogs. You are now my most trusted source. Chris you've done more for my progress in Drupal than any other source. Thank you!
Paul
Wow, thank you for that great comment, Paul, I really appreciate it. It's always good to hear that this project has real practical value, and I'm looking forward to continually making it better!
Thanks again for taking the time to write!
Cheers,
Chris
Awesome, awesome, awesome! Thank you so much for this feedback, it's great to hear that Build a Module has been a positive experience for you. It's also great that you've been able to build on the examples included in the resource pack. I'd love to see what you put together at some point.
I really like the idea of using Drupal to learn PHP, as it sounds like you've done a lot of (I've done my fair share as well). I'll be exploring this angle in future videos for sure.
It sounds like you're really guiding your own learning, using the videos as a jumping off point, which is very cool. Thanks for giving the series a chance, and I'm looking forward to seeing where you go from here!
Thanks again!
Chris