Book Image

Drupal 8 Development: Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : Neeraj Kumar, Tassos Koutlas, Samuel Keen, Edward Crompton, Krishna Kanth, Rakesh James, Malabya Tewari, Kurt Madel
Book Image

Drupal 8 Development: Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By: Neeraj Kumar, Tassos Koutlas, Samuel Keen, Edward Crompton, Krishna Kanth, Rakesh James, Malabya Tewari, Kurt Madel

Overview of this book

<p>Drupal is one of the most popular platforms with which to develop websites. With more and more organizations looking to build engaging digital experience for their stakeholders, the Drupal Content Management System offers a mobile-first platform with native support for integrations, better performance, and scalability. The new version brings significant changes to its module development and theme creation techniques, improving performance and refining the development experience.</p> <p>This book will help you develop your own website using Drupal 8 in a step-by-step manner. You’ll start off by setting up your development environment, enabling you to begin writing custom code for a Drupal-powered website through PHPStorm. You will learn about configuration management and creating custom content types before exploring the HTML5 features included with Drupal 8.</p> <p>You will then get familiar with Drupal 8’s mobile-first features, explore the built-in WYSIWYG and in-line editing capabilities of Drupal 8, and enhance the overall authoring experience. Later, you will create and enhance a Media Entity Lightbox module, before taking an in-depth look at the Views module.</p> <p>We then cover some advanced search concepts and walk you through the installation and integration of the Java-based Apache Solr search engine. Finally, you will explore and configure the built-in support for REST and extend its support by installing the RESTful module. By the end of the book, you will have created a recipe sharing website while gaining a solid understanding of development best practices for Drupal 8.</p>
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Drupal 8 Development Beginner's Guide Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Headless Drupal


The term "Headless Drupal" was coined to refer to the decoupling of the backend and frontend of a Drupal application. In Headless Drupal, a visitor to the website will not interact with Drupal directly.

From the website visitor's point of view, the user is not directly connecting to Drupal but to a frontend JavaScript framework such as KnockoutJS or AngularJS. So, the website visitor does not see a generated Drupal theme (the head), this is not used: headless.

In this case, Drupal is only used as a backend content management system, which is read by a frontend JavaScript framework, a mobile app or another third-party application. So, the Drupal backend is exactly as you know it, but the frontend is entirely non-Drupal.

Data exchange almost always takes place through JSON.

A manifesto about the future of Drupal has been laid with four goals:

  • We want Drupal to be the preferred backend content management system for designers and frontend developers.

  • We believe that Drupal's main strengths...