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)

Summary

You didn't think you were ever going to see this heading did you? This chapter has been very long but highly theoretical. We haven't built anything fun and the only code we saw was to exemplify most of the things we talked about. It was a difficult chapter as it covered many complex aspects of data storage and handling. But trust me, these things are important to know and this chapter can serve both as a starting point to dig deeper into the code and a reference to get back to when unsure of certain aspects.

We saw what the main options for storing data in Drupal 8 are. Ranging from the State API all the way to entities, you have a host of alternatives. After covering the more simple ways, such as the State API, the private and shared tempstores and the UserData API, we dove a bit more into the configuration system, which is a very important one to understand...