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)

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the main aspects of caching in Drupal 8 any module developer needs to be familiar with. We introduced some key concepts and talked about the two main types of caching—Internal Page Cache (used for anonymous users) and Dynamic Page Cache (used for authenticated users).

We dug deeper into cacheability metadata, which is probably the most important and common thing we need to understand. It's imperative to use this properly so that all the render arrays we build are cached and invalidated correctly. We also saw how block plugins have specific methods we can use to define their cacheability metadata and how access results should also receive cacheability dependencies, as needed. Stemming from this, we also explored lazy builders and the auto-placeholdering strategies that allow us to handle highly dynamic components while maintaining...