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

Images

In this section, we are going a bit deeper into the world of images in Drupal while keeping the focus on module developers.

Image toolkits

The Drupal Image toolkits provide an abstraction layer over the most common operations used for manipulating images. By default, Drupal uses the GD image management library that is included with PHP. However, it also offers the ability to switch to a different library if needed by using the ImageToolkit plugins:

Figure 16.3: Image toolkit configuration UI

For instance, a contributed module could implement the ImageMagick library for developers who need support for additional image types such as TIFF, which GD does not support. However, only one library can be used at a time as it needs to be configured site-wide.

Programmatically manipulating images using a toolkit involves instantiating an ImageInterface object that wraps an image file. This interface (implemented by the Image class) contains all the...