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

JavaScript in Drupal

Drupal relies on a number of JavaScript libraries and plugins to perform some of its frontend tasks. For example, the ubiquitous jQuery library continues to be used in Drupal 8 and 9 as well. But of course, there are others.

Another thing I have already mentioned, but which is helpful to bring up again, is the fact that Drupal no longer loads things such as jQuery or its Ajax framework on all pages needlessly. For example, many pages serving anonymous users that do not require jQuery won't even load it. This can greatly improve performance. But it also means that when we define our libraries to include our own JavaScript files, we must always declare these as dependencies (if we need them). For example, jQuery is something you'll often depend on.

Drupal behaviors

One of the most important things you need to know when writing JavaScript files in Drupal is the concept of behaviors. But in order to understand that, let's get a bit of context...