01. Getting started

To focus this tutorial, we'll start by creating a block module that lists links to content such as blog entries or forum discussions that were created one week ago. The full tutorial will teach us how to create block content, write links, and retrieve information from Drupal nodes.

Start your module by creating a PHP file and save it as 'onthisdate.module' in the modules directory of your Drupal installation.

As per the Coding standards, omit the closing ?> tag and use the longhand <?php tag. The $Id$ string will help keep track of the revision number and date when you commit the file to CVS.

All functions in your module are named {modulename}_{hook}, where "hook" is a well defined function name. Drupal will call these functions to get specific data, so having these well defined names means Drupal knows where to look.

The module is not operational yet: it hasn't been activated. We'll activate the module later in the tutorial.