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 (25 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Customer Feedback
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

The role of templates in Drupal


We may have heard the term template before when talking to someone about theming, but what exactly is a template? We can think of a template as a text file no different from any HTML document that provides a method for separating the presentation layer from the business logic.

In traditional PHP websites, we can mix PHP with HTML and CSS, which makes managing web pages both difficult and dangerous. Drupal provides us with the ability to use templating engines to enforce the separation of the two, so we can begin to focus more on the HTML and CSS and worry less about the PHP.

How templates work

In general, templates can contain HTML markup and PHP variables that output content contained within a Drupal database. Templates can be as small as a few lines of HTML that hold the presentational layer for a block that is displayed in a region on the page, or the actual page itself, with containers defined for header, content, and so on:

If we break down the image into...