Helpers

Helpers is a library, or toolbox, with lots of very useful functions that help you build your modules and sites with joy. It is actually six modules in a single package; you may enable only the parts you need.

A helper would, for example be: number_to_currency(), or distance_of_time_in_words(). Or of course something like select_year(), or even select_country().

Basically all kinds of interesting and extremely useful functions that are too specific to make it into core, but still very handy to have at hand. Stuff that you have wondered that "would be very useful in addition to the default PHP".

How cool would it be to call a $form['country'] = select_country() and get a "select your country" select, pre-filled with all the known countries in the world? Or to have a ready made function to render any number as a currency? Or even to render any percentage in a star-rating piece of HTML (render_rate_as_stars()) etc.

This is part of my plan to "bring more Ruby on Rails delight to Drupal". And most of all to make Drupal a developer friendly environment (where developing no longer requires you to think about the folks that might put the currency symbol behind the value... But where that is simply a case of calling a proper function).

The documentation pages for these modules have been freshly updated. Hopefully those pages will help you get started with using these helpful functions.

Feel free to submit patches for more functions, and please read the documentation pages for more information on contributing to this project.

PHP 4 and MySql 4

Due to end-of-life on PHP4 and MySql4, we no longer actively support either of those products. If a problem arises, we will make an effort to work around it, but will not make a guarantee. Drupal 7 will require PHP 5.2.5 or higher and MySql 5 (or Postgres 8); if your host is not at these levels yet, please encourage them to get there ASAP.

Development version status

The development versions (-dev, which rolls up at Noon and Midnight GMT) are where the newest stuff is, including any bug fixes and new features. We try to make sure it is tested before we commit anything, but occasionally a bug will get by us. Your help on testing this code is greatly appreciated. The translation templates may not always be up-to-date in the dev releases.

Current Features being tested in Development

• Add plural and singular functions. #300820: Add functions to pluralize and singularize English nouns
• Corrected Postgres check. #325996: check for postgres
• Remove dependency on helpers_theme. #351721: Why does helpers_database require helpers_theme?
• Added db_fetch_column and db_fetch_assoc. #351726: More DB utility functions
• Improve node_load_current. 6.x only #370918: menu_get_object agaings node_load for drupal6
• Added a time builder function for forms. #371604: Add a time form builder for forms