This video was part of a series of presentations produced in anticipation of Drupal 8's official release. To learn about Drupal 8's new Entity API, take a look at our Entity API series.
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title: Entity API series
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In this presentation we're going to take a high-level look at the new Drupal 8 Entity Field API. This is an improved version of the Entity API and Field API that was started in Drupal 7. Entities are the new recommended way of dealing with data in Drupal and as such, familiarizing yourself with the workings of the Entity API will be important when it comes time to store or retrieve data from your custom modules. It's a big change from what we're used to in Drupal—directly accessing the database via the database abstraction layer—but the Entity Field API also has some distinct advantages.
This presentation covers:
- Improvements to the Entity API
- Improvements to the Field API
- Handlers, Controllers, and ways to manipulate entities
- Discussion of new types of things we can build with these changes
- What you can do to start learning now
After watching this presentation you should be able to articulate the improvements made to the Entity Field API in Drupal 8 and start to understand how you might make use of it in your own code. We'll also cover some of the things you can start doing now in order to prepare yourself to use the Entity Field API in Drupal 8.
Additional resources
- Community documentation for Entities (drupal.org)
- Entity API (api.drupal.org)
- Drupal 8 Entity API DrupalCon Austin presentation (austin2014.drupal.org)
- Topic: Entities (Drupalize.Me)
This video was part of a series of presentations produced in anticipation of Drupal 8's official release. For information about responsive design tools based on official releases of Drupal 8, view tutorials in our Responsive Web Design topic.
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title: Responsive Web Design topic
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Drupal 8 is now a friend of mobile—mobile users, mobile developers, and even mobile site administrators. In this presentation, we'll look at the variety of mobile-friendly features added to Drupal 8 in the areas of site administration, site building, and module development.
"Mobile" means different things to different folks. For a content editor, being able to quickly update a piece of content from any device means one less barrier to getting a task done, when and where they want. For a developer, the prospect of diving into web services and building APIs that can be used for mobile apps or in conjunction with the latest Javascript framework is empowering and exciting, especially since the work of structuring entities and fields and administrating content can stay in Drupal. For the site builder, who simply wants to quickly get a site up and running out-of-the-box with a theme that "just works on mobile," the default responsive theme, Bartik, is a time-saver for sure.
By the end of this lesson, you'll have a better idea of the depth and breadth of what "mobile" means for Drupal 8 users of all kinds.
Additional resources
This course introduces important concepts in object-oriented PHP. It is authored and produced by our partners at KnpUniversity (now SymfonyCasts). In this PHP course, you'll be building a PHP app using PHP and refactoring the code, step-by-step, using concepts in OO-PHP such as classes, methods, access control, type hinting, and constructors. You'll learn how to have one object interact with another and by the end of this project, your PHP app will be sporting some shiny new object-oriented PHP.
In this lesson, Leanna introduces you to the project and shows you how to get it up and running. So, look for the Course code download link below and we'll walk you through the process of getting the app up and running on your computer using the built-in PHP server. As long as you have PHP installed on your computer and a code or text editor, you should be able to complete the lessons in this series. (A full stack web server (i.e. Apache/MySQL/PHP) is not required, only PHP.) Follow along by running commands from the start
directory.
Additional resources
This PHP tutorial covers the basics of classes and objects. You'll learn how to set up a class and then what a class is and what objects are like. By the end of this tutorial you should be able to create a class, an object, create a property, and set the value of a property inside a class.
Additional resources
In this PHP tutorial, you'll learn about methods — functions that live inside objects. You'll also learn how to access properties inside methods using the $this
pseudo-variable.
Additional resources
In this PHP tutorial, you'll get more practice working with methods. Along with adding some functionality to a method using PHP's sprintf()
function to format a string, you'll use the $this
pseudo-variable, and learn how to add and use arguments with methods.
Additional resources
In this PHP tutorial you'll learn how to work with multiple object instances of the same class that have different data and function independently.
Additional resources
In this PHP tutorial, you'll learn how to create a method that will enable multiple objects to interact with each other.
Additional resources
In this PHP tutorial, you'll learn how to add a specially-formatted comment to your method that will enable additional autocomplete functionality in IDEs such as PHPStorm.
Additional resources
In this PHP tutorial, you'll learn how to refactor the practice code in play.php into the Ship class. You'll get more practice working inside of a class and with objects.
Additional resources
In this PHP tutorial, you'll learn about to change the visibility of properties to private
and how this affects how these properties can be accessed. You'll change the public properties to private and then add "getter" and "setter" methods to the class to enable controlled access of the values of these private properties.
Note: the word "hooks" in this video does not refer to hooks in Drupal's API.
Note: PHP does provide magic methods for getting and setting which are explained in this tutorial: Magic Methods: __toString(), __get, __set.
Additional resources
In this PHP tutorial, you'll learn how Type Hinting can help you get better errors from PHP as you develop your application. You'll learn to debug errors and see how Type Hinting impacts the phrasing of the error messages you receive.
Additional resources
In this PHP tutorial, you'll learn how to use Constructors to set up objects and perform certain operations when a new object of this type is instantiated.
Additional resources
Constructors and Destructors (PHP Manual)
Explore more PHP tutorials
This video was part of a series of presentations produced in anticipation of Drupal 8's official release. For information about multilingual sites based on official releases of Drupal 8, take a look at our Multilingual sites topic.
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title: Multilingual sites topic
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This presentation outlines some of the major changes to the Drupal core multilingual system. A lot of features that were in contributed modules have been rolled into core, and a number of existing multilingual features have been greatly improved. There are a lot of cool new things to get up to speed with. In this video, we'll review:
- New and obsolete modules
- UI changes
- Developer changes
After watching this presentation you should have a better understanding of the things you'll need to learn to get up to speed with the new multilingual features in Drupal 8, including things to watch for on the module development and theming sides.
Additional resources
Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative site
Gábor Hojtsy's Multilingual Changes Summary (PDF)
This presentation walks through quite a long list of major contributed modules and best practices that have been incorporated into Drupal 8 core. There are a lot of new features that you'll get out of the box, from Views to Services. In particular we'll cover:
- Exactly what best practices mean
- How core and contributed modules help the community define best practices
- List the major categories of features that have been incorporated
After watching this presentation you should have a better understanding of what best practices are, and a list of the major contributed modules from Drupal 7 that have been added, in one form or another, into Drupal 8.
In this tutorial we're going to play with some extra nice things you can do with Twig. We're going to get expert control of our blocks with the block function, work with concatenating strings, controlling our whitespace, and using undefined variables with the default filter. We'll wrap things up with a look at escaping HTML. Whenever you render content that may have been filled in by the user, you need to escape it. This prevents people from writing HTML tags that you don’t want or, worse, JavaScript code that could be used for cross-site scripting attacks.
In this PHP tutorial we are going to continue to remove the flat functions in our code. We'll refactor one of them to a private function and create a new ShipLoader
service class to clean up the rest. With this refactoring in place, we'll be able to rename the functions.php file since it won't contain any functions any longer.
The next thing we want to tackle is our battle()
function, with its array, inside our BattleManager class. It's not obvious at all what's inside the $outcome
variable, or whether the keys it has now might be missing or different in the future. To rectify this we're going to create a new BattleResult model class with some properties and methods that will clean things up and remove the need for weird associative arrays. Our BattleManager::battle()
function will return a nice BattleResult object, and we'll be in full control of what public methods we put on that.
We now have a BattleResult
class, and we type-hinted the two Ship
arguments. But now, if you look at the battle()
function, there's a case where the ships can destroy each other. When that happens, there is no winning or losing ship—they're both null. Since null
is not a Ship
object, PHP gets angry and throws an error. In this PHP tutorial we'll fix that problem by creating a isThereAWinner
semantic method in our BattleResult
class.
In this PHP tutorial we're going to update some information in our ship object and see another way that objects are different from arrays—objects are always passed by reference. We need to add a new feature to our app so that after the battle we can display the final health of the battling ships. One will be zero or negative, but how much health did the other have left? Let's take a look at how we can update the ships to reflect their new health after a battle.