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

How Drupal Renders an HTML Page

In this chapter, we’ll start to dive into the layers of Drupal that deal with the frontend.

You will learn where a page comes from, how it is assembled, and by which parts. We’ll see what a template is and how it is used by Drupal (and Twig) to deliver an HTML page. Then we’ll talk about theme hooks and render arrays, the structures that Drupal has to mix templates and contents together.

Additionally, you will learn how to define a library to attach custom CSS and JavaScript files to a page.

Finally, you will see how to deliver the content of a controller action as a dialog.

By the end of the chapter, you’ll master the render pipeline of Drupal, and you’ll understand how Drupal builds all its pages.

This chapter will review the following key topics:

  • What is a template?
  • What is a render array?
  • Controllers and blocks
  • How to inject CSS and JavaScript into a template
  • Alternate ways...