Drupal 5

Drupal's scripting abilities just keep getting better and better. Since publishing my Drupal Command Line Script Template last year I've moved exclusively to the Drush php-script (scr) command. The script template article still gets a lot of page views - perhaps because with all the functionality in Drush it's easy to miss the scripting feature - so posting an update seems like a good idea.

Drush Scripting Advantages/Disadvantages

The advantages of using Drush over using my original template are:

• Drush takes care of creating the Drupal environment for the script to run in, which is the only function the template served. Using Drush factors out the environment common code, eliminating redundant code in individual scripts.
• Drush makes it easy to place the script files in a directory outside of the Drupal website home directory. Placing script files outside the website home directory eliminates a whole range of security issues.
• The Drush code that creates the Drupal environment is reviewed by the community, making it far more robust than something a single person could create or maintain on their own.
• When the code required to create the Drupal environment changes you don't need to update individual templates, just Drush.

Note: Drush is now a better option for running Drupal scripts. Please see this article for more information: Drupal Command Line Scripts with Drush.

Drupal does not have user facing content management out of the box. Fortunately, a user facing content management page can be created in 5 minutes using Views. It's not a panacea, but can provide part of the solution.

I typically use this view in conjunction with a menu block. The menu block has visibility set by role and contains links useful to the user, such as a link to this view, the content creation URL (node/add/foo), and the user's profile.

Note: This article covers the l function for Drupal 5. While most of the information is still applicable to Drupal 6, the function call has changed. See http://api.drupal.org/api/function/l/6 for the Drupal 6 version of the call.

Why would anchor tags warrant attention? It's just a text string after all. Concatenate a variable or two with some text to create the link and you're done, right? Maybe.

Do you want to move your code between different Drupal installations? If the answer is yes you need to worry about handling the differences between servers, things like whether clean URLs (1) are enabled or the instance is installed in a base directory (2).

Having to test and determine output based on specific conditions sounds like a good candidate for a function. The Drupal programmers who came before you though so as well, thus we have the "l" function.

The l function brings with it other advantages. If the link is Drupal content with a URL path alias the l function will automatically use the path alias, even if it's passed the Drupal "system" URL. If the URL you're specifying happens to be the current page, it automatically adds class="active", which is very handy when using CSS to theme navigation links.