Drupal 7 Entity Construction Kit - Daily Dose of Drupal Episode 86

The Drupal 7 Entity Construction Kit Module (ECK) can be used to build your own entities on a Drupal 7 website. In this long episode of the Daily Dose of Drupal, I attempt to go through what I know about the Entity Construction Kit module and how it can benefit a site builder in order to build their own custom entities.

In this episode you will learn:

- An overview of Drupal 7 entities and how the Entity Construction Kit can fit into the mix
- How to decide whether to use a Drupal content type or a Drupal entity to store data
- How to build out an entity type with the Entity Construction Kit
- How to add properties to an entity type with the Entity Construction Kit
- How to add bundles to an entity type with the Entity Construction Kit
- How to add fields to an entity type bundle
- How to create a Drupal View that displays a list of your custom created entities

Links:

[stevo]

Thanks for that. The first video I've seen that shows how Drupal can be used to create an online user application.

[timwhelan]

That was a great video that truly helps me understand entities and the ECK. Thanks!

[felipelube]

Thank you! This opened my eyes for great using Drupal!

[_floW]

Sounds like this module tries to take away much of the unnecessary overhead that CCK makes you go through for something like what's demonstrated in this example... Which is pretty cool. Kinda like a CCK type of data entry mechanism or something...

What you said about "not needing all the fields and content types" to achieve what you did in this example essentially sums it up for me. I might have to use this in the future...

[KyleSkrinak]

The potential here is tremendous. Can we set up reference fields, or fields for defined-only values? Relating content types merely for field values always feels like overkill to me.

[SuperBoogerhead]

Have you ever tried to use the ECK for listing embedded widgets? How would you approach that? views? Say the soundclooud widget for example.

[Psicoeducazione]

What do you think about using ECK for creating backend to be used by angularjs?

[motolola]

Very nice Tutorial: My Question is on an Entity view page; Say you want to display Entity that belongs to an Entity|| more like Comments on an Article page, and Links to [Add Entity] on an entity display view like user.

[stumptowndesign]

I still don't understand why you didn't just use multiple text fields, instead of multiple titles. Wouldn't that be more appropriate?