Entity Construction Kit (ECK)
The Entity Construction Kit (ECK) lets you create and manage custom entity types with your own fields and bundles directly through a user interface. This provides a flexible way to structure data, similar to how you'd work with content types, but for any kind of data you need. Developers can also leverage ECK's tools to build and interact with these custom entities more easily.
The Entity Construction Kit (ECK) builds upon the entity system to create a flexible and extensible data modeling system both with a UI for site builders, and with useful abstractions (classes, plugins, etc) to help developers use entities with ease.
ECK allows the creation and management of entity types with custom properties; adding bundles to entity types; and fields to bundles, with the help of the Field UI module.
If that last sentence sounded like a foreign language, I suggest reading the first section of ECK's documentation: Understanding Entity Terminology
If you are developer and want to extend ECK, please checkout the more in depth, Documentation here in drupal.org. If the piece of documentation you were needing is missing, please let us know through the Issue queue. We easily surrender to peer pressure.
Features
For Site Builders
- User Interface for managing entity types, bundles, and entities
- Dynamically add or delete properties from any entity type built with ECK
- Add functionality offered by ECK or other modules to any of your properties through the new behavior system
For Developers
- Classes to create an manipulate entity types and bundles with ease
- ECK introduces a ctools plugin-type called 'property behavior'. Behaviors are useful to write functionality that can be attached to any property
Recommended modules
- ECK Bundle Permissions: provides per-bundle permissions for ECK entity bundles
- Scheduler for Entity Construction Kit (ECK): integrates the Scheduler module with ECK
- Entity Bundle Scaffold: provides Drush commands for managing ECK entity types & bundles
- ECK Site Settings: enables the use of ECK entities as global, site-wide setting entities, as an alternative for modules like Site Settings and Labels or Config Pages.
Similar projects and how they are different
- Content Entity Builder: Create content entity types with base fields as config, plus the possibility to export them to code.