CiviCRM comes out of the box with custom field functionality, and supplies several useful field types. This is great, but what if I want to add data to my CiviCRM contacts that is not one of these field types? What to do? CiviCRM Entity to the rescue! CiviCRM Entity is a Drupal module which exposes many CiviCRM entities as true Drupal entities. That means that almost any module that can use Drupal entities, can access and manipulate CiviCRM data, Drupal style. This includes many commonly used modules such as Views ...

There are two powerful modules used in the Drupal world for creating fast custom searches. Search API is a framework which provides an interface for site builders to create custom searches on any entity known to Drupal. It supports several search backends, including Apache Solr and native database search. It has a flexible API so developers can easily extend, customize, and alter aspects of the search process. Many additional contrib modules are available. Using these techniques, searching millions of records becomes fast and efficient. The Facet API module allows site ...

It's becoming a common request from our clients to find user-friendly ways to integrate CiviCRM data with the rest of their Drupal website functionality. Oftentimes content creators without direct user access to CiviCRM need to do simple things, such as create, update, and delete contacts in simple, specific ways. Example Use Case A hypothetical organization advertises various community service projects that they organize and coordinate. Each service project can have it's own page, created by adding a Project content type to display a description, images, videos, slideshows or other information ...

This series of blog articles will describe Drupal 8 Entities, what they are, how to create them, an explanation of the class structure necessary to integrate with Drupal 8, how to manipulate entities with the Drupal 8 Entity API, and later, how to customize entity types in a variety of ways. Part one of this series, Introduction to Entities will describe what a Entity is, its origination in Drupal 7, and the differences and feature enhancements that Entities have in Drupal 8. What are Drupal Entities? With the release of ...

In part one of the Drupal 8 Entity series, I described the origins and definition of the Entity concept, as well as many of the differences between entities in Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. In this article I will describe how to create a content entity type and some of the basic features that you get from a relatively simple initial process. Creating Custom Entity Types in Drupal 8 As you know if you've developed custom entities for Drupal 7, it required a lot of research, poking around for documentation ...