I want to create an archive page for a custom content type. Essentially list them all on a single page.
I understand that I need to create a module, and implement hook_block_info() and hook_block_view(). What I don't know how to do is to retrieve content so I can loop it out. In wordpress there is query_posts($post_type = mycustomcontenttype). Is there an equivalent in Drupal 7?
I do not want to use the Views module for this.
If you're looking to retrieve $node objects and aren't afraid of formatting the info yourself, node_load_multiple() probably comes closest to solving your problem. The $conditions parameter is supposed to be deprecated, but you could use it to specify content type. If you want to use node_load_multiple() in the manner recommended by the API page, I believe you would just use a simple db_query() to retrieve the node ids (nids) of all content with a given type:
$nids = db_query('SELECT nid FROM {node} WHERE type = my_content_type');
Then you could iterate through the results to create an array of nids to pass to node_load_multiple().
$nid_array = array();
foreach($nids as $nid){
$nid_array[] = $nid;
}
node_load_multiple($nid_array);
From there you're going to have to iterate through the $node objects returned to create your archive page. Depending on whether you're using path aliases, you might have to retrieve the alias for each node.
drupal_lookup_path('alias',"node/".$node->nid);
All that said, I would do this in Views in a heartbeat.
For such queries, there is the EntityFieldQuery class, and the code to use is similar to the following one:
$query = new EntityFieldQuery();
$entities = $query->entityCondition('entity_type', 'node')
->entityCondition('bundle', 'mycustomcontenttype')
->propertyCondition('status', 1)
->execute();
$nodes = entity_load('node', array_keys($entities['node']));
return node_view_multiple($nodes, 'teaser');
Instead of entity_load() you can use node_load_multiple() passing the second argument passed to entity_load().
When showing a list of nodes to user, always filter the nodes basing on their "status" field, except in the case the user has the permission of viewing unpublished nodes; in any case, you should check if the user has that permission.
As third-party modules could restrict the permission to view a node to specific users, instead of depending from the value of the "status" field, you should use node_access('view') to verify the user has the permission to see the node, before to visualizing it.
