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 discussed many things. We saw how logging works in Drupal 8, how the mail API can be used programmatically (and extended), and how the token system can be employed to make our text more dynamic.

While going through this chapter, we also enriched our Hello World module. So, apart from understanding the theory about logging, we created our own logging channel service and logger plugin. For the latter, we decided to send out emails when log messages were of the type error. In doing this, we took a look at the mail API and how we can use it programmatically. We saw that, by default, PHP's native mail() function is used to send out emails, but we can create our own plugin very easily to use whatever external service we want—yet another great example of extensibility via plugins.

Lastly, we looked at tokens in Drupal 8. We saw what components...