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)

Exposing custom data to Views

To get a better understanding of how Views works, we are going to look at an example of totally custom data and how we can expose it to Views. Based on that, we will begin to understand the role of various plugins and can begin to create our own. Additionally, we'll be able to expand on our product entity type data to enrich its Views interaction.

To exemplify all of this, we are going to revisit our sports module in which we declared the players and teams tables of data and which we will now be exposing to Views. The goal is to allow site builders to create dynamic listings of this data as they see fit. The lessons learned from this example can be applied to other data sources as well, even things such as remote APIs (with some extra work).

Views...