Book Image

Drupal 8 Module Development - Second Edition

By : Daniel Sipos
Book Image

Drupal 8 Module Development - Second Edition

By: Daniel Sipos

Overview of this book

Drupal 8 comes with a release cycle that allows for new functionality to be added at a much faster pace. However, this also means code deprecations and changing architecture that you need to stay on top of. This book updates the first edition and includes the new functionality introduced in versions up to, and including 8.7. The book will first introduce you to the Drupal 8 architecture and its subsystems before diving into creating your first module with basic functionality. You will work with the Drupal logging and mailing systems, learn how to output data using the theme layer and work with menus and links programmatically. Then, you will learn how to work with different kinds of data storages, create custom entities, field types and leverage the Database API for lower level database queries. You will further see how to introduce JavaScript into your module, work with the various file systems and ensure the code you write works on multilingual sites. Finally, you will learn how to programmatically work with Views, write automated tests for your functionality and also write secure code in general. By the end, you will have learned how to develop your own custom module that can provide complex business solutions. And who knows, maybe you’ll even contribute it back to the Drupal community. Foreword by Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Placeholders and lazy building

Now that we've seen a bit about how the cacheability metadata can be used in more common scenarios, let's shift gears and talk about those page components that have highly dynamic data.

When we set the maximum age of our Hello World salutation to 0 seconds (don't cache), I mentioned that there are ways this can be improved in order to help performance. This involves postponing the rendering of the respective bit to the very last moment with the help of placeholders. But first, a bit of background.

Each of the cache properties we talked about can have values that make caching the render array pointless. We've already talked about the maximum age being set to 0, but you can also argue very low expiration times to have the same effect. Additionally, certain cache tags can be invalidated too frequently, again making the render arrays...