Drupal 8 Development: Beginner’s Guide, 2nd Edition

Develop your programming skills by creating engaging websites using Drupal 8

About This Book

• Explore the new features of Drupal 8 through practical and interesting examples while building a fully functional recipe sharing website
• Learn about web content management, multi-media integration, and the newly introduced native web services in Drupal 8
• A hands-on, example-driven guide to developing Drupal websites that covers everything from site building, theme development, creating custom modules, as well as the development environment

Who This Book Is For

If you are a developer who wants to use Drupal to enhance your website project and web application to manage content, this book is for you. Whether you are new to Drupal or an experienced web developer, you will be able to master both basic configuration and advanced module development in Drupal through this book.

What You Will Learn

• Set up your Drupal development environment
• Brush up on your understanding of the concepts of object-oriented programming, module development, and test-driven development
• Install and configure Drupal, add new content type, and work through lot of dummy content to create listing pages using views
• Enhance the content author’s user experience and custom block
• Find out about field Type API and explore custom theme development
• Manage various media types in Drupal for your content-rich website

In Detail

Drupal is one of the most popular platforms with which to develop websites. With more and more organizations looking to build engaging digital experience for their stakeholders, the Drupal Content Management System offers a mobile-first platform with native support for integrations, better performance, and scalability. The new version brings significant changes to its module development and theme creation techniques, improving performance and refining the development experience.

This book will help you develop your own website using Drupal 8 in a step-by-step manner. You’ll start off by setting up your development environment, enabling you to begin writing custom code for a Drupal-powered website through PHPStorm. You will learn about configuration management and creating custom content types before exploring the HTML5 features included with Drupal 8.

You will then get familiar with Drupal 8’s mobile-first features, explore the built-in WYSIWYG and in-line editing capabilities of Drupal 8, and enhance the overall authoring experience. Later, you will create and enhance a Media Entity Lightbox module, before taking an in-depth look at the Views module.

We then cover some advanced search concepts and walk you through the installation and integration of the Java-based Apache Solr search engine. Finally, you will explore and configure the built-in support for REST and extend its support by installing the RESTful module. By the end of the book, you will have created a recipe sharing website while gaining a solid understanding of development best practices for Drupal 8.

Style and approach

Each chapter provides examples in a sequential manner from basic to advanced, and each example is explained using easy-to-understand language and a step-by-step approach. This programming experience will enable you to create a wide range of content authoring as well as end user experience.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Setting Up a Drupal Development Environment
Chapter 2. Custom Module Development
Chapter 3. Drupal Views and Configuration Management
Chapter 4. Introduction to the Field Types API and Developing the Custom Field Module
Chapter 5. Theming in Drupal 8
Chapter 6. Enhancing the Content Author’s User Experience
Chapter 7. Adding Media to Our Site
Chapter 8. How Does It Taste? – Getting Feedback
Chapter 9. Advanced Views Development
Chapter 10. Drupal Project Management and Collaboration
Chapter 11. Searching Your Site with the Search API Module
Chapter 12. RESTful Web Services in Drupal