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 a Local Environment

Do you have a Drupal website you need to style? Or maybe it uses a default layout and the result is not what you want?

Drupal splits the management of content and how it is presented on a page in a very precise way. You can have the same content presented with very different layouts.

The layer of Drupal that manages layout and style is called a theme. The aim of this book is to teach you what the theme layer is, how it works, and how to leverage it to style content the way you want.

To get started, you need an environment where you can do your work. You can choose between your local machine or some remote service; in both cases, you will need a way to run a PHP interpreter, a web server, and a database server.

You will also need a code editor that supports working on different kinds of files—such as PHP, CSS, JavaScript, and YAML—and that is advanced enough to help you navigate through the project, write new code, and debug existing code.

In this chapter, we’ll set up that environment.

We will cover the following topics:

  • Installing the required software
  • Installing the demo site
  • Exploring the demo site
  • Disabling production optimization