Drupal 7 is a topsy turvy place where everything you thought you knew about content types and fields goes out the window. Enter the Mad Hatter's world where anything can be an entity and fields can go everywhere. Already the floodgates are opening as developers and users find new ways to take advantage of all the possibilities: Field Collection, Entity Reference, and Entity Construction Kit are brand new concepts. Bean has re-invented blocks as entities. Media has re-invented files as entities. Organic Groups has been re-written to make groups entities. Drupal Commerce makes commerce transactions into entities. The new Entity Translation module treats groups of translated fields as entities. And D7 is just getting out of the gate. This session will look at some of the new entity and field modules, and some older modules that have been re-invented for D7. We'll talk about how they work and where they could be useful and what they get from using the new entity framework. We'll also discuss some of the questions they raise, like when you might want to create a new entity rather than a content type. We will discuss:
A little $entity, history
Fields that relate fields
Fields that relate entities
Fields that ARE entities
Entities that relate entities
Entity utility modules
Field utility modules
Don't forget properties!
Everything is a Node, Take 2

Questions answered by this session:
How do the new entities work?
When do you need an entity rather than a content type?
What's different about fields in D7?
What are some of the most interesting modules that take advantage of the new field and entity APIs?
See some of the possibilities of the new Field and Entity system.