Crowdsource: Drupal 7 Entities Unleashed

Recently I’ve been working on a couple of websites in Drupal 7. One of them has some pretty complicated data structure and relationships. I’ve really been racking my brain as to how to build these data structures in Drupal, to the point of even completely starting over twice.

Then the other day I realized that I’m still holding on to my notions of nodes and content types from Drupal 6. After doing some reading on entities in Drupal 7, I know that creating entities through a custom module is probably the direction I need to go with this site.

So this is where you come in. I’m looking for some help with wrapping my head around entities in Drupal 7. And since I need this help, I figured a lot of other people might also benefit. If you have a book, article, module, tutorial, video, webinar, etc. that helped you, please post a link in the comments. I will keep track of the comments and move the resources up into some kind of structure to make it easy to peruse. When you post a link, feel free to comment on the positives or negatives of the particular resource so we have some context for your recommendation.

Here a few resources I found to get you started:

Books

• Drupal 7 Module Development - Entities Chapter and code examples
• Pro Drupal 7 Development - Good Book but light on entities info

Articles

• Drupal Entities - Part 1 - Moving Beyond Nodes
• Leverage Entities

Vidoes

• Entities - Emerging Patterns of Usage

Modules & Documentation

• Entity API Module
• Entity API Documentation
• Field Collection Module (builds small entities for you from a fieldset)
• Modules built with Entities (use as examples)
  • Model Entities (Creates a model Entity for use in development)
  • Profile2
  • Rooms
  • Drupal Commerce

Image: stock.xchng by lusi