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

Block access

Another major area where you will deal with access is when trying to control access to a custom block. If you remember, in Chapter 2, Creating Your First Module, we created the HelloWorldSalutationBlock plugin so that our salutation can also be rendered using a block. Now that block can be placed in a region and even configured to show up only on certain pages, for certain user roles, or even on node pages restricted by bundle. This is all done in the UI:

Figure 10.3: Configuring our custom block

However, this is oftentimes not enough, and you will want to have a block placed in a region and control under what circumstances it should show up yourself. Enter block access.

Inside the BlockBase plugin base class, there is the blockAccess() method which always returns positively. This is because, by default, all blocks will be rendered once they are placed in a region. Unless, of course, they are configured to only show in certain cases, in which...