Book Image

Drupal 9 Module Development - Third Edition

By : Daniel Sipos
Book Image

Drupal 9 Module Development - Third Edition

By: Daniel Sipos

Overview of this book

With its latest release, Drupal 9, the popular open source CMS platform has been updated with new functionalities for building complex Drupal apps with ease. This third edition of the Drupal Module Development guide covers these new Drupal features, helping you to stay on top of code deprecations and the changing architecture with every release. The book starts by introducing you to the Drupal 9 architecture and its subsystems before showing you how to create your first module with basic functionality. You’ll explore the Drupal logging and mailing systems, learn how to output data using the theme layer, and work with menus and links programmatically. Once you’ve understood the different kinds of data storage, this Drupal guide will demonstrate how to create custom entities and field types and leverage the Database API for lower-level database queries. You’ll also learn how to introduce JavaScript into your module, work with various file systems, and ensure that your code works on multilingual sites. Finally, you’ll work with Views, create automated tests for your functionality, and write secure code. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned how to develop custom modules that can provide solutions to complex business problems, and who knows, maybe you’ll even contribute to the Drupal community!
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
3
Chapter 3: Logging and Mailing

Introduction to the Drupal access system

If you've been doing some site building in Drupal or have experience with previous versions of Drupal, you may already know a thing or two about roles and permissions. If not, no need to worry, as we will talk a bit about how these work.

Essentially, one of the things that makes Drupal special is the flexible access system it has out of the box, based on user roles and permissions. Roles are attributes that can be given to a user. The latter can have multiple roles assigned, but always has at least the default Authenticated User role. Permissions are the individual access indicators that can be assigned to roles. By the transitive property, users have all the permissions assigned to the roles they have been assigned. So, the end result is a matrix of permissions by role, and that's actually how it is visualized in the UI at admin/people/permissions:

Figure 10.1: Configuring user permissions

Drupal core,...