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)

Defining contextual links

Contextual links are a bit more complicated than the other types of links we've seen before, but nothing is too challenging for us. Let's take a look at how we can add contextual links to our salutation component so that users can navigate to the configuration form via a contextual link.

First, we will need to create the .links.contextual.yml file and define the link:

hello_world.override:
title: 'Override'
route_name: hello_world.greeting_form
group: hello_world

Nothing too complicated here. Again, we have a title link and a route_name. Additionally, we have a group key, which indicates the group name that this link will be a part of. We will reference this later.

Next, we will need to alter our theme hook template file because the contextual links are printed in a title_suffix variable that is available in all theme hooks and...