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)

Theming

The most obvious part of Drupal's theming system is the Appearance admin page found at admin/appearance, which lists all the themes installed on your website:

When you choose a theme from the Appearance page, you are applying a specific graphic design to your website's data and functionality. However, the applied theme is in reality only a small part of the entire theming layer.

This book focuses mostly on building modules that encapsulate chunks of functionality. However, since we're ultimately building a web application, everything output by our functionality will need to be marked up with HTML. In Drupal, this process of wrapping data in HTML and CSS is called theming.

In this chapter, we will discuss how our module integrates with the theme layer. We will talk about the architecture of the system, theme templates, hooks, render arrays, and others. Then...