Drupal 8 Entity Construction Kit (ECK) - Daily Dose of Drupal Episode 224

The Drupal 8 Entity Construction Kit (ECK) Module allows you to use the Drupal admin interface to build custom entity types. Sometimes you need additional data structures in your Drupal site and it doesn’t make sense to create it as a content type, this is where the ECK module comes in. Using it, you can create your custom entity data structures in Drupal 8 and add fields to them, similarly to how you build out content types.

These custom entity types can be themed and styled similarly to content types, but there are some differences. The general rule of thumb I recommend following is to think if you want the data to be displayed as a page that the website visitor will view. If you want a website visitor to access that information at a specific URL and you may want to add things such as comments, metatags, or more to this information, then a content type makes sense. If you don’t want a website visitor to access this information on it’s own page, and instead are going to use this information as more backend data or information that will feed into a page (but not require its own page), then ECK is the perfect fit.

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[kingfisher-]

Very useful explanation of nodes being different than entities created here. Thanks

[kovtunos]

Thanks. Never heard of this module before. Can be useful in some cases.

[HaiNguyen-xwep]

Thank you so much! Keep on the good work :)

[PrimephotoStudio]

Nice video, thank you for sharing it with us, very helpful.

[_floW]

This is pretty interesting but the takeaway I got from this (and from reading other things online about it), it sounds like it's mostly a form of data entry that exists outside of traditional CMS paradigms, like making web pages. In other words, it's a CMS-equivalent of database management for data (not pages) that can plugged into the CMS functionalities that pages are managed through (i.e. - Views).


Sounds really awesome and I'm happy to know about this now. In the past, whenever a need for something like this came up, I always made content types but I can see now that was way overkill (despite working well enough). I'll definitely be using this in the future.

[_oh_johny]

The date in the video is the 29.08. but the upload date is 28.08. 🤔