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)

Data Modeling and Storage

We have gone through five chapters already in this book, but we have yet to cover a topic that has to do with one of the main purposes of a CMS—data storage. Okay, we hinted at it in the previous chapter and also saw an example of a configuration object in the second one. However, we merely scratched the surface of what is possible. It's now time to go ahead and dive into everything related to how you can store data in Drupal 8.

In this and the next chapter, we will talk about a lot of things related to storage and data manipulation, and take a look at a lot of examples in the process. The focus of this chapter will, however, be more theoretical. There is a lot of ground to cover, as there are many APIs and concepts that you will need to understand. However, we will still see plenty of code examples to demonstrate in practice what we are talking...