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

Different types of data storage

Storing and using data are a critical part of any (web) application. Without somehow persisting data, we wouldn't be able to build much of anything. However, different uses of data warrant different systems for storing and manipulating it. For the purposes of this chapter, I will use the word data to mean almost anything that has to be persisted somewhere, for any given period of time.

Since Drupal 8, various layered APIs have been introduced to tackle common use cases for data storage. The strength of these new systems is mirrored in the fact that we rarely, if ever, need to even use the mother of all storage APIs, the database API. This is because everything has been abstracted into different layers that help us handle most of what we need.