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)

Assets and libraries

Now that we know more about render arrays, how they are structured, and the pipeline they go through, we can talk a bit about asset management from a module development perspective. Because even though it is usually a theme responsibility, module developers often have to add and use CSS and JS files to their modules, and it all happens in render arrays.

Working with CSS and JS files has become standardized in Drupal 8 compared to its previous version where we had more than one way to do things. Libraries are now key, so let's see how they work by going through some examples of making use of some CSS or JS files.

There are three steps to adding assets to your page:

  • Creating your CSS/JS file
  • Creating a library that includes them
  • Attaching that library to a render array
...