Data Modeling and Storage

We have gone through five chapters already in this book, but we have yet to cover a topic that has to do with one of the main purposes of a CMS—data storage. Okay, we hinted at it in the previous chapter and saw an example of a configuration object in Chapter 2. However, we merely scratched the surface of what is possible. It’s now time to go ahead and dive into everything related to how you can store data in Drupal.

In this and the next chapter, we will talk about a lot of things related to storage and data manipulation, as well as see a lot of examples in the process. The focus of this chapter will, however, be more theoretical. There is a lot of ground to cover, as there are many APIs and concepts that you will need to understand. However, we will still see plenty of code examples to demonstrate in practice what we are talking about. In the next chapter, though, to make up for it, we will almost entirely work with code and build a few functionalities...