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)

Twig fundamentals


Twig (http://twig.sensiolabs.org) is the new template engine introduced to Drupal 8 and is a companion to Symfony, the new PHP framework that Drupal 8 is built on. Twig provides us with a fast and secure way to separate content from PHP logic in a manner that makes it easier for non-developers to work with templates. Before we begin working with Twig, let's first dive into the steps involved in enabling Twig debugging.

A Twig template outputs PHP with a template-oriented syntax using opening and closing curly brackets {{ ... }}. This syntax interprets the variable between the brackets and outputs HTML in its place. The following are three kinds of delimiters in Twig that trigger an evaluation to take place:

  • The first is Twig commenting, which uses the comment tag {# ... #} to provide comments inline or around a section of HTML.
  • Next is the print tag {{ ... }}, which is used to print the result of an expression or variable. The print tag can be used by itself or within a section...