Creation of Hello World module in Drupal 6

1. Create a folder for your module

Create a folder in your modules directory called helloworld ie sites/all/modules/helloworld/. It is good practice to put all custom modules in sites/all/modules/ folder and not the modules/ folder. The modulesfolder is meant for core modules any “third party” or custom modules should be in sites/all/modules/.

So now that you’ve created the folder sites/all/modules/helloworld/

2. Create the *.info file

Create a file called modulename.info in this case helloworld.info

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; $Id$ name = Hello World Module description = My very first Drupal Module core = 6.x

This lets Drupal know about your module

3. Create the *.module file

Create a file called modulename.module in this case helloworld.module

We need to let Drupal know what path the module will be accessible from. We do this by using thehook_menu() hook. To implement  hooks follow the following convention: modulename_hookname(). So for our module we must create a function called helloworld_menu(). More info here .

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function helloworld_menu(){ $items = array(); $items['helloworld'] = array( 'title' => t('Welcome to the Hello World Module'), 'page callback' => 'helloworld_page', 'page arguments' => array(1), 'access arguments' => array('access content'), 'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,   );   return $items; }

Break Down

We created $items['helloworld'] array item. This lets drupal know about the path we want to use for our module.

title: this is what gets printed at the top of the page. The page title.
page callback: This is the function that gets called when the url is accesed.
page arguments: must be array of arguments that get parsed to the call back function, not required.
access arguments: array of access permissions in this case any role with ‘access content’ permissions can access the page.
type: specifies the menu type check hook_menu()  for more details the Drupal hook.

So in a nutshell, when Drupal hits the http://mysite.com/helloworld url it will look for a call back function called helloworld_page(). Simple Enough. Now lets create the helloworld_page() function.

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function helloworld_page($argument) {    return "Hello World!"; }

So your helloworld.module file will contain:

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<?php function helloworld_menu(){ $items = array(); $items['helloworld'] = array( 'title' => t('Welcome to the Hello World Module'), 'page callback' => 'helloworld_page', 'page arguments' => array(1), 'access arguments' => array('access content'), 'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,   );   return $items; } function helloworld_page($argument) {     return "Hello World! Arguments parsed was " . $argument; }