Book Image

Drupal 9 Module Development - Third Edition

By : Daniel Sipos
Book Image

Drupal 9 Module Development - Third Edition

By: Daniel Sipos

Overview of this book

With its latest release, Drupal 9, the popular open source CMS platform has been updated with new functionalities for building complex Drupal apps with ease. This third edition of the Drupal Module Development guide covers these new Drupal features, helping you to stay on top of code deprecations and the changing architecture with every release. The book starts by introducing you to the Drupal 9 architecture and its subsystems before showing you how to create your first module with basic functionality. You’ll explore the Drupal logging and mailing systems, learn how to output data using the theme layer, and work with menus and links programmatically. Once you’ve understood the different kinds of data storage, this Drupal guide will demonstrate how to create custom entities and field types and leverage the Database API for lower-level database queries. You’ll also learn how to introduce JavaScript into your module, work with various file systems, and ensure that your code works on multilingual sites. Finally, you’ll work with Views, create automated tests for your functionality, and write secure code. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned how to develop custom modules that can provide solutions to complex business problems, and who knows, maybe you’ll even contribute to the Drupal community!
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
3
Chapter 3: Logging and Mailing

Introduction to the multilingual ecosystem

The multilingual and internationalization system is based on four Drupal core modules. Let's quickly go through them and see what they do:

  • Language
  • Content translation
  • Configuration translation
  • Interface translation

Language

The Language module is responsible for dealing with the available languages on the site. Site builders can choose to install one or more languages from a wide selection. They can even create their own custom language if necessary. The installed languages can then be added to things such as entities and menu links in order to control their visibility, depending on the current language. Apart from the installed ones, Drupal comes with two extra special languages as well: Not Specified and Not Applicable.

The module also handles the contextual language selection based on various criteria, as well as provides a language switcher to change the current language of the site:

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