Book Image

Drupal 8 Theming with Twig

By : Chaz Chumley
Book Image

Drupal 8 Theming with Twig

By: Chaz Chumley

Overview of this book

Drupal 8 is an open source content management system and powerful framework that helps deliver great websites to individuals and organizations, including non-profits, commercial, and government around the globe. This new release has been built on top of object-oriented PHP and includes more than a handful of improvements such as a better user experience, cleaner HTML5 markup, a new templating engine called Twig, multilingual capabilities, new configuration management, and effortless content authoring. Drupal 8 will quickly become the new standard for deploying content to both the web and mobile applications. However, with so many new changes, it can quickly become overwhelming knowing where to start and how to quickly. Starting from the bottom up, we will install, set up, and configure Drupal 8. We’ll navigate the Admin interface so you can learn how to work with core themes and create new custom block layouts. Walk through a real-world project to create a Twig theme from concept to completion while adopting best practices to implement CSS frameworks and JavaScript libraries. We will see just how quick and easy it is to create beautiful, responsive Drupal 8 websites while avoiding the common mistakes that many front-end developers make.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Drupal 8 Theming with Twig
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating a theme file


The *.theme file is a PHP file that contains theme hooks for preprocessing variables. We will create a theme file specific to our theme that we can use to grab the comment count, based on each individual post, and then return the count to our Twig template as a variable that can be printed.

Let's begin by creating a new file called octo.theme and saving it to our themes/octo folder.

Next, we will add the following PHP code:

<?php

function octo_preprocess_node(&$variables) {
  $node = $variables ['elements']['#node'];
  $id = $node->id();

  // Create comment count variable for template
  $count = _octo_comment_count($id);
  $variables['comment_count'] = _octo_plural($count, 'Comment',
  'Comments');
}

The octo_preprocess_node(&$variables) function is known as a theme hook and is an adaptation of theme_preprocess_node. Within this function, we are passing by reference any variables accessible to the Node using &$variables. Since everything in Drupal is...