Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development: Build fast, responsive Drupal websites with custom theme design to deliver a rich user experience

Book Synopsis:

A comprehensive guide to creating Drupal themes from scratch, from design to fully styled websites with custom Twig templates and headless architecture

Key Features

• Explore real-world examples with proven methodologies to gain a deeper insight into the Drupal theme layer
• Learn how to translate a graphic design into a maintainable and robust Drupal theme
• Improve performance and accessibility with a decoupled frontend to consume data exposed by Drupal's APIs

Book Description

Working with themes in Drupal can be challenging, given the number of layers and APIs involved. Modernizing Drupal 10 Theme Development helps you explore the new Drupal 10's theme layer in depth.

With a fully implemented Drupal website on the one hand and a set of Storybook components on the other, you'll begin by learning to create a theme from scratch to match the desired final layout. Once you've set up a local environment, you'll get familiarized with design systems and learn how to map them to the structures of a Drupal website. Next, you'll bootstrap your new theme and optimize Drupal's productivity using tools such as webpack, Tailwind CSS, and Browsersync. As you advance, you'll delve into all the theme layers in a step-by-step way, starting from how Drupal builds an HTML page to where the template files are and how to add custom CSS and JavaScript. You'll also discover how to leverage all the Drupal APIs to implement robust and maintainable themes without reinventing the wheel, but by following best practices and methodologies. Toward the end, you'll find out how to build a fully decoupled website using json:api and Next.js.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to confidently build custom Drupal themes to deliver state-of-the-art websites and keep ahead of the competition in the modern frontend world.

What you will learn

• Map design systems made by Storybook components to Drupal structures
• Understand and use render arrays and Twig templates
• Get familiarized with the new Single Directory Component feature introduced in Drupal 10.1
• Define, import, and use CSS and JavaScript libraries
• Discover how to style content created with fields and paragraphs
• Define, place, customize, and style blocks
• Explore advanced topics like extending Twig, making a theme configurable, and boosting performance and accessibility
• Find out how to build a decoupled website using json:api and Next.js

Who this book is for

If you are a Drupal backend developer or frontend developer who wants to create Drupal themes that follow industry best practices and are fast and maintainable, this book is for you. Basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and working knowledge of a CMS are needed to grasp the concepts present in this book.

Table of Contents

1. Setting Up a Local Environment
2. Creating a New Theme and Setting Up a Build Process
3. How Drupal Renders an HTML Page
4. Mapping the Design to Drupal Components
5. Styling the Header and Footer
6. Styling the Content
7. Styling Forms
8. Styling Views
9. Styling Blocks
10. Styling Maintenance, Taxonomy, Search Results, and 403/404 Pages
11. Single Directory Components
12. Creating Custom Twig Functions and Filters
13. Making a Theme Configurable
14. Improving Performance and Accessibility
15. Building a Decoupled Frontend