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)

Cacheability metadata

Cacheability metadata is used to describe the thing that is rendered with respect to its dynamism. Most of the time, as Drupal 8 module developers, we will be using this metadata when working with render arrays. We will see a bit later where else these come into play, but for now, let's see what the actual properties are and what they are used for in the context of render arrays.

When creating render arrays, there are a few things we need to think about when it comes to caching. And we always need to think about these things.

Cache tags

The first thing we need to think about is what our render array depends on. Are we rendering some entity data? Are we using some configuration values? Or anything...