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)

Tokens

The last thing we will cover in this chapter is the Token API in Drupal 8. We will cover a few bits of theory and, as usual, demonstrate them via examples on our existing Hello World module code. We will do this in the context of the mails we are sending out for error logs.

It would be nice if we could include some personalized information in the mail text without having to hardcode it in the module code or configuration. For example, in our case, we might want to include in the email the username of the current user that is triggering the error log that is being emailed.

Let's first understand how the Token API works, before going into our Hello World module.

The Token API

Tokens in Drupal are a standard formatted...