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

Render arrays

Render arrays also existed in the previous versions of Drupal and they were important to the theme system. Since Drupal 8, however, they have become the thing—a core part of the Render API that is responsible for transforming markup representations into actual markup.

Acknowledging my limits as a writer, I will defer to the definition found in the Drupal.org documentation, which best describes what render arrays are:

... a hierarchical associative array containing data to be rendered and properties describing how the data should be rendered.

Simple, but powerful.

One of the principal reasons behind having render arrays is that they allow Drupal to delay the actual rendering of something into markup to the very last moment. What do I mean by this? For example, in Drupal 7, oftentimes as module developers we were calling the actual rendering service (the theme() function) inside a preprocessor to "render" some data in order to print the resulting...