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 took on the client-side and talked about JavaScript and client-side capabilities in Drupal 8. We started with the approach we need to take when writing JavaScript in a Drupal context. We learned about behaviors, why they are important, and how to use them. We also saw how we can pass around data from the server (Drupal) to the client-side and make use of it in JavaScript.

Funnily enough, we then switched to a no-JavaScript-allowed policy for the rest of the chapter. We did this to prove how powerful the Drupal Ajax API is, with which we can perform complex server-to-client interactions even if we are not frontend developers that can write JavaScript code. And to demonstrate the API, we first looked at how simple links can be turned into Ajax requests. We followed that up with an important refactor of our earlier product importer functionality which...