Book Image

Drupal 8 Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Matt Glaman
Book Image

Drupal 8 Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Matt Glaman

Overview of this book

Began as a message board, Drupal today is open source software maintained and developed by a community of over 1,000,000 users and developers. Drupal is used by numerous local businesses to global corporations and diverse organizations all across the globe. With Drupal 8’s exciting features it brings, this book will be your go-to guide to experimenting with all of these features through helpful recipes. We’ll start by showing you how to customize and configure the Drupal environment as per your requirements, as well as how to install third-party libraries and then use them in the Drupal environment. Then we will move on to creating blocks and custom modules with the help of libraries. We will show you how to use the latest mobile-first feature of Drupal 8, which will help you make your apps responsive across all the major platforms. This book will also show you how to incorporate multilingual facilities in your sites, use web services and third-party plugins with your applications from inside Drupal 8, and test and deploy your apps.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating blocks using plugins


In Drupal, a block is a piece of content that can be placed in a region provided by a theme. Blocks are used to present specific kinds of content, such as a user login form, a snippet of text, and many more.

Blocks are annotated plugins. Annotated plugins use documentation blocks to provide details of the plugin. They are discovered in the module's Plugin class namespace. Each class in the Plugin/Block namespace will be discovered by the Block module's plugin manager.

In this recipe, we will define a block that will display a copyright snippet and the current year and place it in the footer region.

Getting ready

Create a new module like the one shown in this recipe, with a defined info.yml so that it can be discovered by Drupal. We will refer to the module as mymodule throughout the recipe. Use your module's appropriate name.

How to do it...

  1. Create a src/Plugin/Block directory in your module. This will translate the\Drupal\mymodule\Plugin\Block namespace and allow...