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)

JavaScript and the Ajax API

So far in this book, we've only talked about topics that can be considered to relate to backend development. This means heavy PHP working with the APIs and the database, and so on. This is because this book is oriented toward module developers rather than "themers". Also, the author of this book is admittedly not a JavaScript, or any kind of frontend, developer.

Nevertheless, in this chapter we'll switch gears and talk a bit about frontend development, namely, how to work with JavaScript in a Drupal 8 application. This is because there are many things developers can and should be doing in their modules that require frontend technologies. There are a few approaches and techniques specific to Drupal when it comes to adding and using JavaScript files and we will talk about those here. Moreover, we will also prove how powerful Drupal...