Searchable Drupal API function examples

Summary: A Drupal API/functions experiment - A searchable collection of Drupal projects to demonstrate Drupal API function examples.

I just started a new Drupal API examples experiment recently. The basic concept is to make it easier for Drupal programmers to be able to find working, real-world Drupal API programming examples as a way to help document the available Drupal API functions.

To that end, I downloaded the most popular Drupal projects, ran them through some filtering programs I created, and currently the end result is this collection of Drupal functions/API programming examples. (I say "currently" in that sentence because I also want to put a good source code search engine on top of all of these Drupal programming examples.)

Searchable Drupal API functions and examples

The end game here is to have a great collection of searchable Drupal API examples. Imagine it this way: You're a relatively new Drupal programmer, and you need to be able to do some sort of Drupal programming thing. You know there's probably a Drupal function to do what you want, but you don't know the name of that function, or the specific function API. You can either scour the Drupal API to find what you want, or, you can use a custom-built Drupal source code search engine to find real world, working Drupal API examples that show exactly how to call Drupal functions.

I think both approaches have a lot of merit, and the real end game is probably a mix of both approaches, letting you find both Drupal API documentation as well as Drupal function examples from real-world programs.

I don't have a custom search engine built on top of this yet, so at the moment I'm just using the Google's site search code. This isn't ideal at all, but it's a start. I have found one source code search engine that I really like, but I'm a little concerned about the security of that tool, so I may set that up on another website (assuming this actually becomes a useful project).

Drupal source code programming examples - Summary

Once again, here's a link to the top-level page of the searchable Drupal API functions programming examples I created, using the source code from the most popular Drupal projects.

As mentioned in the About page you'll find there, I'll also be donating money back to the open source Drupal projects that make these searchable Drupal programming examples possible. I hope this can not only turn into a great way for programmers to find Drupal examples, but also a nice way to give back to the Drupal projects developer community.