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

Where to start

Drupal is a CMS, and its primary feature is to allow non-technical users to insert, edit, and manage complex editorial content using a web interface (the administration interface). Content can then be shown to end users in multiple ways. Starting from Drupal 8, the system is API-frst, and can be used as the backend in a headless architecture. But, out of the box, Drupal renders its content as HTML pages (we’ll refer to this as the frontend throughout the rest of the book).

This double behavior is possible thanks to the high level of decoupling between where the content is built in Drupal core and where it is converted into HTML for the final output. The layer that converts content into HTML is called the theme layer.

Drupal allows users to choose different themes for both the administration and frontend interfaces.

Themes are hierarchical, where a child theme can extend or alter its parent theme, adding new CSS, replacing HTML templates, or changing the...