Book Image

Drupal 10 Module Development - Fourth Edition

By : Daniel Sipos
Book Image

Drupal 10 Module Development - Fourth Edition

By: Daniel Sipos

Overview of this book

Embark on a journey of Drupal module development with the latest edition of this must-have guide written by Daniel Sipos – a Drupal community member! This fourth edition is meticulously revised to cover the latest Drupal 10 enhancements that will help you build custom Drupal modules with an understanding of code deprecations, changing architecture, data modeling, multilingual ecosystem, and so on. You’ll begin with understanding the core components of Drupal 10 architecture, discovering its subsystems and unlocking the secrets of creating your first Drupal module. Further, you'll delve into Drupal logging and mailing systems, creating theme hooks, and rendering a layout. As you progress, you'll work with different types of data storage, custom entities, field types, and work with Database APIs for lower-level database queries. You'll learn to reap the power of JavaScript and ensure that your code works seamlessly on multilingual sites. You'll also learn to create custom views, automate tests for your functionalities, and write secure code for your Drupal apps. By the end of this book, you'll have gained confidence in developing complex modules that can solve even the most complex business problems and might even become a valuable contributor to the Drupal community!
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
3
Chapter 3: Logging and Mailing

The UserData API

Now, I want to briefly talk about another user-specific storage option, provided by the User module, called UserData.

The purpose of the UserData API is to allow the storage of certain pieces of information related to a particular user. Its concept is similar to the State API in that the type of information stored is not configuration that should be exported. In other words, it is specific to the current environment (but belonging to a given user rather than a system or subsystem).

Users are content entities who can have fields of various data types. These fields are typically used for structured information pertaining to the user, for example, a first and a last name. However, if you need to store something more irregular, such as user preferences or a flag that a given user has done something, UserData is a good place to do that. This is because the information is either not something structured or is not meant for the users themselves to manage. So, let’...