Book Image

Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development

By : Luca Lusso
4 (1)
Book Image

Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development

4 (1)
By: Luca Lusso

Overview of this book

Working with themes in Drupal can be challenging, given the number of layers and APIs involved. Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development helps you explore the new Drupal 10’s theme layer in depth. With a fully implemented Drupal website on the one hand and a set of Storybook components on the other, you’ll begin by learning to create a theme from scratch to match the desired final layout. Once you’ve set up a local environment, you’ll get familiarized with design systems and learn how to map them to the structures of a Drupal website. Next, you’ll bootstrap your new theme and optimize Drupal’s productivity using tools such as webpack, Tailwind CSS, and Browsersync. As you advance, you’ll delve into all the theme layers in a step-by-step way, starting from how Drupal builds an HTML page to where the template files are and how to add custom CSS and JavaScript. You’ll also discover how to leverage all the Drupal APIs to implement robust and maintainable themes without reinventing the wheel, but by following best practices and methodologies. Toward the end, you’ll find out how to build a fully decoupled website using json:api and Next.js. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to confidently build custom Drupal themes to deliver state-of-the-art websites and keep ahead of the competition in the modern frontend world.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Styling Drupal
12
Part 2 – Advanced Topics
17
Part 3 – Decoupled Architectures

Setting up the environment to build a decoupled site

Since Drupal 8, the CMS can natively expose its internal structures (entities and configurations) to third-party systems.

With minimal or no configuration, you can start building the frontend of a Drupal website without using Twig and instead choose one of the many available JavaScript frameworks (such as Next.js, Vue.js, or React).

Drupal core provides two modules that can be used to expose content and other data to the to external systems:

  • RESTful Web Services
  • JSON:API

Both modules have pros and cons, and you should choose the one most appropriate for your use case. Sometimes, to fulfill requirements for some complex websites, you may have to use both.

In the following sections, we’ll expose data first with RESTful Web Services and then with JSON:API module to feed some vanilla JavaScript code. The output will be a fully decoupled HTML page that renders the details of a trip.

Figure 15.1 – A trip node rendered in a plain HTML file ...