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

What is a template?

As we’ve already mentioned, one of the strengths of Drupal is the clean separation between where the content is created and where it is converted into HTML pages. This is possible because, internally, Drupal uses a render engine that is capable of merging data and markup.

That render engine is Twig.

WebProfiler

The internal workings of Drupal are complex, and there is sparse documentation about how it works on the internet. To simplify our work as a Drupal Themer, we may need a tool that collects useful data from the content management system (CMS).

The Drupal contributed (contrib) module WebProfiler is what we’re looking for. Let’s install it using Composer:

ddev composer require drupal/webprofiler

After the download completes, we can enable it with Drush:

ddev drush pm:enable webprofiler

WebProfiler depends on Devel, another useful module that we’ll use in the coming sections.

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