Tokens are a pretty powerful weapon to have in your arsenal, and they actually come in useful a lot if you remember that they’re there.

If you haven’t used them before, tokens are essentially text placeholders – they can be static text, variables, field values, whatever you want really.

The Token API is now part of Drupal 7 core and as it turns out, using it to create your own tokens is super easy – you just need a couple of hooks.

The first hook, hook_token_info(), is used to declare any custom tokens.

/** * Implements hook_token_info(). */function module_name_token_info() {  $info = array();  // Define a new token type.  $info['types']['my_custom_tokens'] = array(    'name' => t('My custom tokens'),    'description' => t('A token type for my custom tokens.'),  );  // Define any new tokens.  $info['tokens']['my_custom_tokens']['my_cool_token'] = array(    'name' => t('My cool token'),    'description' => t('A token I use to show that I am cool.'),  );  return $info;}

We are creating our own custom token type here too but if you just want to put your token in an already existing type, you can get a list of the existing tokens and types by calling token_get_info().

Now that our new token is good and defined, we just need to give it some content with hook_tokens().

/** * Implements hook_tokens(). */function module_name_tokens($type, $tokens, array $data = array(), array $options = array()) {  $replacements = array();  if ($type == 'my_custom_tokens') {    // Loop through the available tokens.    foreach ($tokens as $name => $original) {      // Find our custom tokens by name.      switch ($name) {        case 'my_cool_token':          // Work out the value of our token.          $value = 'Whatever we want the token to be';          // Give our token it's value!          $replacements[$original] = $value;          break;      }    }  }  return $replacements;}

That’s it! Our token should now be available and appear in the list of tokens wherever tokens are available.