Render Arrays in Drupal 7. "Render Arrays" or "Renderable Arrays" are the building blocks of a Drupal page, starting with Drupal 7.
A render array is an associative array which conforms to the standards and data structures used in Drupal's theme rendering system. In many cases, the data used to build a page (and all parts of it) is kept as structured arrays until the rendering stage in the theming system. This allows enormous flexibility in changing the layout or content of a page, and provides future performance enhancements as well. Note: While render arrays and arrays used by the Form API share elements, properties and structure, many properties on form elements only have meaning for the Form API, not for the Render API. Form API arrays are transformed into Render arrays by drupal_get_form.
What is "rendering"? Rendering in the Drupal world means turning structured "render" arrays into HTML. What is a render array? <? Why was this done? Altering How are Render Arrays Related to Elements? <? Return $items;} <? Resources. How to theme Drupal 7 for any situation using preprocessing functions and template file suggestions. Developer, trainer, enthusiast Greetings!
My name is Chris Shattuck and I'm the creator of BuildAModule (over 700 video tutorials to help anyone learn Drupal). I speak regularly at Drupal events, and have developed a training model that is allowing communities around the world learn Drupal for free across numerous continents. I work full time on BuildAModule and have been for the last several years, so I'm not generally available for freelancing gigs - but I can give you some tips on where to get some help. When I'm not immersed in Drupal and work, I'm working as a dad. My alter ego (the one that's hanging out in the attic until the kids are older) is a musician and is in the process of figuring out what all this is about.
I work at a treadmill desk and have had the honor of influencing numerous others to give it a shot. Enjoy the site, and just send me an email if you have any questions. A peek at Drupal 7 theme system changes. [Update Feb 20, 2011: I presented an update of my Grok Drupal (7) Theming session at Drupal Design Camp Los Angeles.
A write-up with links to the slides and video can be found in the post titled (naturally enough) "Grok Drupal 7 Theming - Update".] [Update January 2011: Drupal 7.0 has been released!] Every major release has introduced significant changes to the core API. There's no backwards compatibility between major Drupal releases; you can't run Drupal 7 modules on a Drupal 6 site, for example. In fact, if you tried you'd likely end up with the white screen of death.
For theming, fortunately, the changes have usually been rather incremental — a short checklist of minor changes to themes to get them working in the newer Drupal. That is, until now. 50 (or so) drops make for an ocean of changes Drupal 7 represents just about as big of a theme refactoring as possible, without replacing the core phpTemplate theming engine. Html.tpl.php modules/system/html.tpl.php contents region.tpl.php Why?
<?