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

Chapter 15: Views

Views has always been a staple module for any Drupal site. It was so popular and needed that it ended up being incorporated into Drupal core. So now, each new Drupal site ships with Views out of the box, fully integrated with the rest of the system and powering a great number of core features.

Essentially, Views is a tool for creating and displaying lists of data. This data can be almost anything, but we mostly use Drupal entities as they are now so robust. It provides the architecture to build and manipulate complex queries through the UI as well as many different ways of outputting the resulting data. From a module developer's point of View (yes, pun intended), much of this power has been broken down into multiple layers of building blocks, abstracted as plugins. Moreover, in keeping with tradition, there are also a multitude of hooks that are fired at different stages with which we can programmatically contribute to, or influence, Views.

In this chapter...