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)

Entities

We have finally reached the point where we talk about the most complex, robust, and powerful system for modeling data and content in Drupal 8the Entity API.

Entities have been around since Drupal 7 which shipped with a few types such as node, taxonomy terms, users, comments, files, and so on. However, Drupal core only provided a basic API for defining entities and loading them consistently. The Entity API contributed module bridged a large gap and provided a lot of functionality to make entities much more powerful. In Drupal 8, however, these principles (and more) are found in core as part of a robust data modeling system.

The Entity API integrates seamlessly with the multilingual system to bring fully translatable content and configuration entities. This means that most data you store can be translated easily into multiple languages. In Drupal 7, this was always...