Rendering node contents only For the purposes of the Cycle plugin I need to render a node without any external buildup, just the $content. Is that possible?
In Drupal 7, node_build_content() governs the generation of the render array for the node's content:

$node = node_load(1);
$content = node_build_content($node);


If you take a look at the source for it, you can see how the final render array is built and you can pick and choose what you want in the render array by copying the relevant parts from node_build_content().

For example, if you wanted to just render the node's fields, you might do:

$view_mode = 'full';
$langcode = LANGUAGE_NONE;

$node-&gt;content = array();

field_attach_prepare_view('node', array($node-&gt;nid =&gt; $node), $view_mode, $langcode);
entity_prepare_view('node', array($node-&gt;nid =&gt; $node), $langcode);
$node-&gt;content += field_attach_view('node', $node, $view_mode, $langcode);


If you did that, $node-&gt;content would then contain the render array for just the fields without all the extraneous stuff like links or other stuff third-party modules might add.