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

A recap of Field type plugins

Field type plugins extend the lower-level TypedData API to create a unique way of not only representing data (within the context of entities), but also storing it in the database (and other stuff as well). They are primarily known as the type of fields site builders can add to an entity type bundle. For example, a plain text field or a select list with multiple options. Nothing can be more common than that in a CMS.

However, they are also used as entity base field types. If you remember our product entity type's name field definition, we actually did use these plugin types:

$fields['name'] = BaseFieldDefinition::create('string') 
  ->setLabel(t('Name')) 
  ->setDescription(t('The name of the Product.')) 
  ->setSettings([ 
    'max_length' => 255, 
    'text_processing' => 0, 
  ]) 
 ...