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

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at how we can create custom fields that site builders (and developers) can add to entity types. This implied defining three plugin types: FieldType, FieldWidget, and FieldFormatter, each with its own responsibility. The first defined the actual field, and its storage and individual data properties, using the TypedData API. The second defined the form through which users can input field data when creating or editing entities that use the field. The third defined how the values inside this field can be displayed when viewing the entity.

We also saw that each of these plugins can have arbitrary sets of configurable settings that can be used to make the field dynamic—both in how the widget works and in how the values are displayed. Moreover, these settings are part of the exported field configuration, so we saw how we can define their respective configuration schemas.

Lastly, we also saw how—aside from creating our new field through...