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)

Content entities and the Translation API

So far in this chapter, we've mostly talked about how to ensure that our modules output only text that can also be translated. The Drupal best practice is to always use these techniques regardless of whether the site is multilingual. You never know if you'll ever need to add a new language.

In this section, we are going to talk a bit about how we can interact with the language system programmatically and work with entity translations.

A potentially important thing you'll often want to do is check the current language of the site. Depending on the language negotiation in place, this can either be determined by the browser language, a domain, a URL prefix, or others. The LanguageManager is the service we use to figure this out. We can inject it using the language_manager key or use it via the static shorthand:

$manager = \Drupal...