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

Common theme hooks

In this section, we will look at three common theme hooks that come with Drupal core that you are likely to use quite often. The best way to understand them is, of course, by referring to an example of how to use them. So, let's get to it.

Lists

One of the most common HTML constructs are lists (ordered or unordered), and any web application ends up having many of them, either for listing items or for components that do not even look like lists. But for the purposes of marking up, an ul or ol fits the bill best. Luckily, Drupal has always had the item_list theme hook, which is flexible enough to allow us to use it in almost all cases.

The item_list theme hook is defined inside drupal_common_theme(), is preprocessed (by default) in template_preprocess_item_list(), uses the item-list.html.twig template by default, and has no default theme hook suggestions (because it's so generic and registered outside the context of any business logic). If we inspect...