Book Image

Drupal 8 Module Development - Second Edition

By : Daniel Sipos
Book Image

Drupal 8 Module Development - Second Edition

By: Daniel Sipos

Overview of this book

Drupal 8 comes with a release cycle that allows for new functionality to be added at a much faster pace. However, this also means code deprecations and changing architecture that you need to stay on top of. This book updates the first edition and includes the new functionality introduced in versions up to, and including 8.7. The book will first introduce you to the Drupal 8 architecture and its subsystems before diving into creating your first module with basic functionality. You will work with the Drupal logging and mailing systems, learn how to output data using the theme layer and work with menus and links programmatically. Then, you will learn how to work with different kinds of data storages, create custom entities, field types and leverage the Database API for lower level database queries. You will further see how to introduce JavaScript into your module, work with the various file systems and ensure the code you write works on multilingual sites. Finally, you will learn how to programmatically work with Views, write automated tests for your functionality and also write secure code in general. By the end, you will have learned how to develop your own custom module that can provide complex business solutions. And who knows, maybe you’ll even contribute it back to the Drupal community. Foreword by Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Introduction to the Drupal access system

If you've been doing some site building in Drupal 8 or have experience with previous versions of Drupal, you may already know a thing or two about roles and permissions. If not, no need to worry, as we will talk a bit about how these work.

Essentially, one of the things that makes Drupal special is the flexible access system it has out of the box, based on user roles and permissions. Roles are attributes that can be given to a user. The latter can have multiple roles assigned, but always has at least the default Authenticated User role. Permissions are the individual access indicators that can be assigned to roles. By the transitive property, users have all the permissions assigned to the roles they have been assigned. So, the end result is a matrix of permissions by role, and that's actually how it is visualized in the UI at...