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

Using a starterkit

Until Drupal 9, the recommended way to create a new custom theme was to extend from a core theme called Classy. The Classy theme contained a copy of all the templates from Drupal core with markup enriched by some useful classes. So, nearly every custom theme out in the wild is a sub-theme of Classy. This has caused some issues with the evolution of Drupal, because Classy needed to stay backward compatible with its first version (which came out with Drupal 8).

Classy has been deprecated and removed from Drupal 10 as a new way of creating custom themes has emerged.

Drupal 10 has a new theme generator command that can be used to create a custom theme from a starterkit. Instead of sub-theming Classy, you can use this command to generate your new theme as a copy of some starterkit. Basically, instead of extending a base theme, you rather copy all the assets of that theme to a new one, completely owned by you. Core provides a default starterkit with markup similar...