Hooks in Drupal

The Drupal documentation has great information about hooks in general, configuration to enable hooks for your module, and this guide on starting out with hooks.

In order to start using hooks with a Drupal-based CiviCRM installation, you or your administrator needs to do the following:

1. Create a file with the extension .info (for instance, myhooks.info) containing the following lines. Replace the example text in the first 2 lines with something appropriate for your organization, and assign 7.x to core if you use Drupal 7.

   name = My Organization's Hooks
   description = Module containing the CiviCRM hooks for my organization
   dependencies[] = civicrm
   package = CiviCRM
   core = 7.x
   version = 7.x-1.0
   

2. Create a new file with the extension .module (for instance, myhooks.module) to hold your PHP functions.

3. Upload both the .info and .module files to the server running CiviCRM, creating a new directory for them under /sites/all/modules (for instance, /sites/all/modules/myhooks/) inside your Drupal installation. The directory name you create should be short and contain only lowercase letters, digits, and underlines without spaces.
4. Enable your new hooks module through the Drupal administration page.

Additionally, if you are using Drupal and add a new hook to an existing module, you will need to clear the cache for the hook to start operating. One way of doing this is by visiting the page Admin > Build > Modules.

Inspecting Hooks

The documentation about hooks can be somewhat abstract, and it sometimes helps to see interactively how the hooks run.

• If you use Drupal, then you can inspect some hooks by installing these two Drupal modules:
  • devel
  • civicrm_developer