A lightweight default content solution for Drupal 7 install profiles

As you may have read last week, we're starting up a Drupal 8 CX initiative which will feature a site for tracking the status of Drupal 8 module ports.

We'll be displaying a curated list of modules that we've identified as priorities for Drupal 8. But in order for others to build their own site to track their own priorities, we're building the site using an install profile.

Because I'm using an automated phing task to 'burn and reinstall' the site on a regular basis, I needed a simple lightweight solution for default content - for things like blocks (using bean) and basic nodes.

Read-on to see my approach.

by lee.rowlands /

The solution

So inspired by Drupal 8, I wanted to use yml to define the default entities. So I started with a folder inside my install profile called 'content' and then inside there I created a file for each entity type like so

Next I need something to parse the yaml, so I fired up my terminal and added a composer dependency

composer require symfony/yaml

Then it prompts me for a version, now I already had require-dev for drush, so I needed to pick a compatible version of symfony/yaml - ~2.2 will suffice

The whole thing looks like this:

Next I need to make sure that PHP can find the new classes, so in my profile I added an include for the autoloader

// Load composer autoloader.
include_once dirname(DRUPAL_ROOT) . '/vendor/autoload.php';

Next I need to ensure that the entity api module is enabled, but thats a one-liner in my profile's .info file

dependencies[] = entity

Then I added a small snippet to my install profile's hook_install() like so:

// Create default content.
  try {
    foreach (file_scan_directory(__DIR__ . '/content', '/\.yml$/') as $file) {
      // Files are named {entity_type}s.yml.
      $entity_type = substr($file->name, 0, -1);
      $entities = Yaml::parse(file_get_contents(__DIR__ . '/content/' . $file->filename));
      foreach ($entities as $values) {
        $entity = entity_create($entity_type, $values);
        entity_save($entity_type, $entity);
      }
    }
  }
  catch (Exception $e) {
    watchdog_exception('drupalinfo', $e);
  }

So what does the yml file look like? Here is a snippet from nodes.yml

credits:
  title: Credits
  body:
    und:
      -
        value: |
          Sometimes there is a need for strings to wrap over multiple lines for
          readability
        format: rich_text
  type: page
  uid: 1

Conclusion

So this is a pretty simple and lightweight method for shipping default content. Sure it doesn't support images or references, but if all you need is some simple data, or data to test your build process - its a satisfactory solution