Drupal is a web-based Content Management System (CMS). While it is useful out of the box, it is designed with developers in mind. The purpose of this book is to explain how Drupal can be extended in many ways and for many purposes. To this end, the version we will use will be the latest one at the time of writing this book--Drupal 8.2. In this book, we will cover a wide range of development topics. We'll discuss how to create a Drupal 8 module, and as we go through the chapters, many concepts and tips that will help you build what you need will be introduced. The goal is not only to explain how things work but also to go through some examples to demonstrate them. Since no book can contain everything, I hope that after reading this book, you'll be able to expand on this knowledge on your own using the resources I reference and by looking into the Drupal code yourself. As helpful as such a book can be for learning any kind of software development, if you really want to progress, you will need to apply the knowledge you learned and explore the source code yourself. Only by doing this you will be able to understand complex systems with many dependencies and layers.
This chapter introduces the terminology, tools, and processes for developing Drupal 8. While subsequent chapters focus on code, this chapter focuses on concepts. We'll talk about the architecture of Drupal and how you can hook into Drupal at strategic places to extend it for accomplishing new tasks.
The following are the major topics we will be covering in this chapter:
- An introduction to Drupal development
- Drupal 8 architecture
- The major subsystems
- Tools for developing in Drupal
By the end of this chapter, you will understand the architectural aspects of Drupal and be ready to start writing code.
