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

Using our custom field type as a base field

At the beginning of this chapter, I stressed the importance of understanding the makeup of a field (type, widget, and formatter) so as to easily define base fields on custom entity types. This understanding allows you to navigate through Drupal core code, discover their settings, and use them on base fields. So, let's cement this understanding by seeing how our new field could be defined as a base field on a custom entity type.

Here is an example where we actually use all the available settings we defined for each of the three plugins. Note that any settings that are left out default to the values we specified in the relevant defaults method, as follows:

$fields['plate'] = BaseFieldDefinition::create('license_plate') 
  ->setLabel(t('License plate')) 
  ->setDescription(t('Please provide your license plate number.')) 
  ->setSettings([ 
  ...