Chapter 1, Setting Up a Drupal Development Environment, walks you through the setup of a Drupal development environment as the professionals do it. You'll be introduced to a range of powerful tools that will make Drupal development more efficient and fun, and it will also help you drastically improve your productivity.

Chapter 2, Custom Module Development, gets stuck into code. You'll be writing object-orientated code to make your modules more flexible and extendable. The chapter will also cover test-driven development, which is the basis of everything you need to deploy Drupal sites that consistently do what they should.

Chapter 3, Drupal Views and Configuration Management, showcases the new configuration management system of Drupal 8, which allows you to properly separate site configuration from site content. You'll see how content types and field configuration is now done using a markup language called YAML.

Chapter 4, Introduction to the Field Types API and Developing the Custom Field Module, explores how HTML5 support has been built into Drupal 8 and the new features that this provides. You'll be building a new custom field to showcase some of these features.

Chapter 5, Theming in Drupal 8, introduces the Twig templating engine and guides you through building a fully responsive theme. The chapter will also cover theme hooks that allow you to further modify the default look and feel of Drupal 8.

Chapter 6, Enhancing the Content Author's User Experience, illustrates how Drupal 8 vastly improves the administration interface, where users have often been sadly forgotten in previous versions of Drupal. Drupal 8 isn't just for end users, it's also for editors, moderators, and administrators of the site too.

Chapter 7, Adding Media to Our Site, helps you launch a multimedia campaign by introducing a range of media elements to your site. You'll learn how to make your site more compelling and convey the required message, not only in words, but also in other types of media.

Chapter 8, How Does it Taste? – Getting Feedback, walks you through the built-in functionality of Drupal 8 to get feedback from your users. This chapter will also cover starting a two-way conversation by building a form to help your users communicate with you and submit their views or requests.

Chapter 9, Advanced Views Development, takes an in-depth look at the Views module, which you'll use in many of your Drupal projects. We'll look at how to create a custom Views plugin that uses jQuery.

Chapter 10, Drupal Project Management and Collaboration, introduces you to a place where you can make some best friends—the Drupal community. We'll look at tools for collaboration, how to get more involved in the Drupal community, and how to work as a team to build something amazing.

Chapter 11, Searching Your Site with the Search API Module, introduces some powerful search functionality provided by the Search API, a framework for extending Drupal's standard search. We'll look at what it can achieve on its own, and then take a look at Apache Solr, a third-party search engine that will make your search functionality lightning fast.

Chapter 12, RESTful Web Services in Drupal, breaks down all the boundaries of your Drupal development. You'll create a custom API using REST and an AngularJS app that will consume content from Drupal using the API. Now Drupal doesn't just need to power websites—it could power almost anything.

Appendix, Pop Quiz Answers, covers all the answers enlisted in the pop quiz sections of the book.

To follow the examples in this book, you'll need a computer on which you can set up your own development environment with a number of useful tools. All these tools are either open source or have free equivalents. The PhpStorm IDE mentioned in Chapter 1, Setting Up a Drupal Development Environment, is a proprietary and fairly expensive piece of software, but you could also use NetBeans or Eclipse as alternative IDEs, as they have comparable features.

You're also going to need an Internet connection. Many of the examples in this book rely on external services such as GitHub or PuPHPet and you'll have to do some fairly large downloads if you're installing some of the recommended software packages from scratch.

This book is aimed at people who would like to start configuring, developing, or theming with Drupal 8. Although no experience with previous versions of Drupal is necessary, you'll find many familiar Drupal concepts if you've already used Drupal 7.

For development-focused chapters, it's assumed that you have some prior knowledge of PHP and are aware of modern PHP development practices. The theming chapters will assume that you are familiar with HTML and CSS. Some experience using the command line would be useful, but not essential.

Above all, an inquisitive mind, a readiness to make mistakes, and an enthusiasm to embark on a great Drupal adventure are most important.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Time for action, What just happened?, Pop quiz, and Have a go hero).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a procedure or task, we use these sections as follows:

Instructions often need some extra explanation to ensure they make sense, so they are followed with these sections:

You will also find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Navigate to the module page on Drupal to get the link to the latest packaged tar.gz file."

A block of code is set as follows:

<div>
  <ul>
    <li>content 1</li>
    <li>content 2</li>
  </ul>
</div>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

git checkout [filename]
git reset --hard

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on Save and then re-index your content."

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