Book Image

Mastering Drupal 8

By : Sean Montague, Chaz Chumley, William Hurley
Book Image

Mastering Drupal 8

By: Sean Montague, Chaz Chumley, William Hurley

Overview of this book

Drupal is an open source content management system trusted by governments and organizations around the globe to run their websites. It brings with it extensive content authoring tools, reliable performance, and a proven track record of security. The community of more than 1,000,000 developers, designers, editors, and others have developed and maintained a wealth of modules, themes, and other add-ons to help you build a dynamic web experience. Drupal 8 is the latest release of the Drupal built on the Symfony2 framework. This is the largest change to the Drupal project in its history. The entire API of Drupal has been rebuilt using Symfony and everything from the administrative UI to themes to custom module development has been affected. This book will cover everything you need to plan and build a complete website using Drupal 8. It will provide a clear and concise walkthrough of the more than 200 new features and improvements introduced in Drupal core. In this book, you will learn advanced site building techniques, create and modify themes using Twig, create custom modules using the new Drupal API, explore the new REST and Multilingual functionality, import, and export Configuration, and learn how to migrate from earlier versions of Drupal.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Block layout and Regions

Before we can begin working with blocks, we need to be familiar with Block layout and Regions. We need to know where things are located, what blocks Drupal 8 provides us with, and the concept of Regions.

We can navigate to the Block layout page by directly entering /admin/structure/block, or by using the Admin toolbar and clicking on Structure | Block layout:

The Block layout page provides the interface that allows us to manage block content by placing blocks into regions. Blocks can be categorized based on their functionality, with the most common types including the following:

  • Core: Blocks contained within the core installation consisting of items such as page title, primary admin actions, and tabs
  • System: Blocks that provide system functionality consisting of breadcrumbs, main-page content, messages, site branding, and a few others
  • Forms: Blocks that...