X-ray

X-ray module gives a look at the skeletal structure of a site to help developers and site builders see how things work.

Overall goals

• Provide visual aids and information to help site builders understand their own sites or ones they've taken over.
• Provide visual aids and information useful for module developers.

Like-minded modules

Other modules that also have some sort of site self-inspection goals that provide features we would build into X-ray if these modern Drupal modules did not already exist:

Development X-Rays

• Devel module
• WebProfiler

Site-building X-Rays

• Site Documentation module
• Paragraphs usage — which content types allow use of which paragraph types
• Paragraphs report — which specific pieces of content actually use which paragraph types

(For Drupal 7, see also Architecture module.)

X-ray Background

This module is based on a suggestion submitted to the Contributed Module Ideas group by Zoë Neill-St. Clair. It was built as an example module for the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7.

X-ray Drupal 7 Features

• A technical summary is added to the help above the main administrative sections. For example, blocks, content types, and menus are summarized on Structure; themes on Appearance; etc.
• A table of permission titles matched to their permission machine names.
• A table of most* hooks which Drupal invokes (and when they are invoked) and that are available to be implemented.
• The function and arguments producing each page you visit, displayed on that page.
• The form ID of every form you see, displayed on the form.

The development of this module is described in 94-page detail in the Module Development chapter of the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7.

Past planned features

• To node pages, add what content type the node is.
• A report with a technical overview of the site content structure, with relationships between content types. (Ideally, this will be graphical.)
• A report with explanations of what in Drupal produces each page in the menu structure.

* Hooks are based on naming convention, and can only all be identified by very careful grepping of the code, which this module does not do; instead, all hooks which use module_invoke() are identified.