What will you learn
- Overview of the Render API and its components
- Recognizing, and understanding, render arrays and render elements
- Using predefined render elements to output data formatted with common HTML patterns
- Defining custom render element types
- Overview of the Cache API and its components
- Using cache keys, tags, contexts, and max-age to define cacheability
- Implementing lazy builders and placeholders for dynamic content
- Ensuring ouptut is translatable
Overview
This guide for developers focuses on methods to output content and data from a module in "the Drupal way", ensuring content output and formatting can be customized by themes or modules, UI text can be translated, all without affecting the business logic of the output.
The Drupal Render API is a framework for transforming structured arrays into HTML output, enabling dynamic and flexible rendering of content and markup. It's important for Drupal module developers to output content using the Render API, templates, and other themable methods to ensure consistency, flexibility, and maintainability in the presentation layer, allowing designers and theme developers to customize and style the output without altering the underlying logic.
Drupal's Cache API provides mechanisms for storing and retrieving data efficiently to improve performance, and its use in outputting render arrays ensures that content is cached and reused, reducing server load and response times.
Module developers should use Drupal’s i18n features to ensure that all user-facing text is translatable, thereby supporting multilingual functionality and making the site accessible to a global audience.
Courses
Render API
This course provides an overview of the fundamental concepts and pieces of the Render API. Including the structure and use of render arrays, how render elements are defined and the role they play, and the process that Drupal goes through to convert render arrays into HTML. By the end of the course, you will have a comprehensive understanding of how to manage and manipulate content presentation in Drupal.
Output Themeable Content
This course consists of practical examples of outputting content from a module including generating URLs and outputting links, adding plain text and simple HTML markup, and incorporating classes and HTML attributes into render arrays. You will also learn how to output content using Twig template files, create lists of items, and use properties like #prefix and #suffix to wrap elements. Additionally, the course will teach you how to control element visibility with #access, define new render element types, and more.
Caching
This course covers the Cache API's key components, including cache keys, tags, contexts, and max-age, and how they are used to define the cacheability of content. You will also learn how to add cache metadata to render arrays to improve performance and ensure proper cache invalidation. Additionally, the course will explore the use of lazy builders and placeholders to handle highly dynamic content efficiently.
Output Translatable Content
This course covers the use of the t() function in PHP, the Drupal.t() function in JavaScript, and the t filter in Twig templates. You will learn how to use placeholders for dynamic content, understand the importance of context in translations, and ensure that all strings are properly sanitized and escaped. By the end of this course, you will be able to make your Drupal site's interface fully translatable.
