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.

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

Accelerate your development process using Drupal 8 Views through this advanced, practical guide.

Key features

• A practical, step-by-step guide with illustrative examples to give you a clear understanding of Drupal 8 views
• Get the only book on the market that talks about Drupal 8 views and their importance for developers
• Get an understanding of how views work and how they help to create modular applications

Topic and description

Learn how to build complex displays of content—all without programming.

Views was used on more than 80% of all Drupal 7 sites; now it is part of the Drupal 8 core. While many site builders and site owners are aware of Views, they don't understand how to take full advantage of its power to create many amazing pages and blocks. If they are using Views, they might build 10 different view displays with different filters, without knowing that a contextual filter would require only a single display.

Using our sample company, we'll take its existing content and evolve an ever more complex and powerful website for that company, starting with adapting the administration the user sees and moving on to making complex pages of information for site visitors.

While the book is written for Drupal 8, the similarities between Views in Drupal 7 and 8 make this a useful reference for Drupal 7 site builders also.

What you will learn

• Create displays of content that are automatically updated when you add new content
• Show maps and rotating image carousels on your site
• Combine content to create composite displays using the same data in different ways
• Use fields from more than one content type to create powerful views of multi-table data
• Modify the field data being displayed, combining it in different ways or changing the HTML that might be normally generated
• Add headers and footers above and below a views display
• Make the output of your view look exactly as the designer specifies
• Change the order in which a list of content is displayed, and limit the content shown to certain content types or values
• Filter content using values passed to the view in the URL, making a single view work in different ways

About This Book

• Build complete, complex websites with no prior knowledge of web development entirely using the intuitive Drupal user interface
• Follow a practical case study chapter-by-chapter to construct a complete website as you progress
• Ensure your sites are modern, responsive and mobile-friendly through utilizing the full features available in Drupal 8

Who This Book Is For

If you want to learn to use Drupal 8 for the first time, or you are transitioning over from a previous version of Drupal, this is the book for you. No knowledge of PHP, MySQL, or HTML is assumed or required

What You Will Learn

• Set up a local “stack” development environment and install your first Drupal 8 site
• Find out what is available in Drupal 8 core
• Define content types and taxonomies—and find out when you should do so
• Use the powerful Views module
• Get hands-on with image and media handling
• Extend Drupal using custom community modules
• Develop the look and feel of your website using Drupal themes
• Manage site users and permissions

In Detail

Drupal 8 sets a new standard for ease of use, while offering countless new ways to tailor and deploy your content to the Web. Drupal 8 allows user to easily customize data structures, listings, and pages, and take advantage of new capabilities for displaying data on mobile devices, building APIs, and adapting to multilingual needs.

The book takes you step by step through building a Drupal 8 website. Start with the basics, such as setting up a local “stack” development environment and installing your first Drupal 8 site, then move on to image and media handling, and extending Drupal modules. Push your knowledge by getting to grips with the modular nature of Drupal, and learning to extend it by adding new functionalities to create your new modules. By the end of the book, you will be able to develop and manage a modern and responsive website using Drupal.

With Drupal 8’s recent release and the exciting features it brings, this book will be your go-to guide to experimenting with all of these features through helpful recipes.

We’ll start by showing you how to customize and configure the Drupal environment as per your requirements, as well as how to install third-party libraries and then use them in the Drupal environment. Then we will move on to creating blocks and custom modules with the help of libraries. We will show you to use the latest mobile-first feature of Drupal 8, which will help you make your apps responsive across all the major platforms. This book will also show you how to incorporate multilingual facilities in your sites, use web services and third-party plugins with your applications from inside Drupal 8, and test and deploy your apps.

Create beautiful responsive Drupal 8 websites using Twig
Quickly master theme administration, custom block layouts, views, and the Twig template structure
A step-by-step guide to the most common approaches in web design

Drupal 8 for Absolute Beginners is your definitive guide to starting from scratch with Drupal even if you have little web knowledge. This book teaches you the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP in relation to Drupal, so that you can begin to use this popular CMS with all of its features.
You will first learn how to set up and customize a basic blog using Drupal, one of the most powerful and popular content management systems available today. From there you will learn the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP, and apply this knowledge to create your own custom Drupal module. You will learn how to build, style, and add functionality to your own Drupal module from scratch. You will then use Drush to apply a theme to Drupal, customizing everything to your liking, before publishing your work to the world. The book also covers some more advanced topics that beginners often ask about, such as getting set up with Git and using source control, using MySQL to interact with a database, and a guide to getting up and running with Linux.
Rarely has all the knowledge required to start with Drupal been collated in one place as it is in Drupal 8 for Absolute Beginners. You need no prior knowledge of the web, only a desire to learn. The book is fully supported by video material on the author's website. Start your Drupal journey with this book today!