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HTML (HyperText Markup Language) editors are software tools that facilitate the creation, editing, and management of HTML code for building and maintaining web pages. HTML editors streamline the process of coding by offering various features like syntax highlighting, error checking, and code suggestions. These tools are invaluable for web developers and designers, helping them efficiently create web content with accuracy and speed. HTML editors can vary from simple text editors to advanced integrated development environments (IDEs) with extensive functionalities for web development.

The world of ecommerce is always changing, offering many chances for success. This guide is your key to success in 2024.

Drupal has become a top choice in the world of content management systems (CMS). It has over 48,000 community-created modules for web development.

Drupal is a good CMS, that anyone with some development experience, can use to develop websites and applications. In today’s article we are going to continue with our series on Drupal 8, the best CMS in the whole wide world and focus on Views . The Views feature that is included with Drupal, allow a user to create a list of content to present on their website. The display of views is handled by the core Views module, and users can create and edit their views through the Views UI . Any content that is stored on a website’s database can be displayed using Views, in different ways, such as table with sortable fields, grid layouts, teasers or pictures that link to articles, blocks, JSON output, RSS feeds, calendar and on-screen slideshows. A view has several parts, which can be seen by a user when he/she is creating a view, such parts are the display (page, block, feed, attachment), format, fields, filter criteria, sort criteria, contextual filters and relationships. Views essentially allows users to create a list of content, for a website, without having to know any SQL or know the database. Views allow users to choose, the format of the results, users can open the format windows, and choose a format from the list of formats. Such formats are the grid, an HTLM list, Jump menu, a table and an unformatted list. A user can add fields to the view, to show, the contents of its database, the fields can be chosen only when a user chooses a certain format, such as an HTML list. As the user ads fields to his/her views configuration, it is important to note that as the user ads these fields, he/she is presented with a dialog box, that prompts them to set certain settings options for a field. Users can also choose where their views are going to appear on the page, when they turn their views into a block and choose where to place the block, in the block layout page. Users can also choose to rewrite the results of their views, by changing the settings options, under the rewrite results tab. Views formatter allow users to change the way, in which views display information to users on a website. The style of a view can also be manipulated, by going into the settings options for each field, under the style settings tab of the settings. Users can choose their HTML element, add a CSS class, wrap the field’s label, and create a class for that field as well. If a user wants to limit the amount of CSS classes that Drupal adds by default, the user can uncheck the add default classes box found under the fields’ settings under style settings. The views module allows users to use the power of relationships, for them to relate tables together and pull information from both tables. Developers can relate two tables, by adding a relationship , under the advance settings options, under add a relationship. Once the relationship has been added, then the user can add the field from the other tables, which have been related to the view. Users also have the option to put two table columns together, in the table’s setting under format, when users chose the table format option. Thank you for reading this article!!!

Drupal is a great content management system, that everyone should use to build their systems. In today’s article we are going to talk about another Drupal concept which we need to delve a bit deeper, this concept is known as modules . If you would like your site to be more dynamic, by adding new features and extending Drupal core, then you’d need to know what a module is and know how to use and develop them. Developers can also alter existing functionality developed a website, which meet the requirements of stakeholders, by only using the features of Drupal that they need. Community-contributed modules are available to any developer, who wish to fulfil a certain specific purpose. Developers must know what they need, and determine the functionality they are looking to fulfill, to know how to locate, install and evaluate existing modules, which is a huge part of learning Drupal. When necessary new modules can be created, by writing PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript code. Solving specific project requirements, requires a developer to use a module, which contain custom features or alter existing features. Custom modules are types of modules, that usually reside in the /modules/custom directory, they are project-specific, and written for a specific application. Contributed modules are another type of modules, found and downloaded from Drupal.org, these modules are placed in the /modules/contrib directory and are not part of Drupal core. Another type of modules are core modules, these modules are found in the /core/modules/ directory and are part of Drupal core. During the development of a module, it is a very good idea to understand how to secure, and keep the code updated, so that the website does not suffer, from security vulneraries and is always up to date. Another thing to remember when writing code to develop a custom module, is to adhere to Drupal’s coding standards . It is important to understand what coding standards are and why they are important to follow, to write code. The set of rules designed for programmers, which define best practices, code formatting and various other rules, is known as coding standards. Following coding standards, can help programmers on a team, to be able to follow and understand each other’s code, because everyone would have to follow the same conventions. Developers learn how to style and format their code, by following code standards, which define how the code will be read and how it will look. Indentation, whitespace and line length are all part of the style coding standards of Drupal. The whole Drupal project has a sense of coherence, when developers across the globe, using Drupal adhere to the same coding standards. Setting up expectations on how code should look, is a good thing, and makes coding standards very important. It is essential in a community like Drupal, for developers to follow coding standards, because developers around the world, can read, maintain and modify each other’s code. Drupal’s codebase can also stay consistent, when there are concrete coding standards, to follow. Another important part of code standards is substance , which has information about the content and standard of your code. The use of various functions and components in your code, is very important according to substance coding standards  Thank you for reading this article!!!

The world is changing and with that, the world of technology is changing as well, and everyone who is part of society must adhere to new sets of rules and standards that come with a chance to develop a successful society. In today’s article we are going to continue talking about Drupal and focus again on coding standards. Formatting is part of Drupal’s coding standards, and it coves things such as whitespace, aspects which influence the format and appearance of your code and the way that the code should be structured. Indentation in Drupal is very specific, developers should use 2 spaces of indentation, although there is much debate in the programming world, about indentation. The way to end your code on a file would be to leave one extra blank line at the end of the file, this file ending structure is known as the Unix file ending. In Drupal, operators should always have one space around them, specifically the ones that are enclosed under parenthesis. For example, if ($a == 'system' || $b == 'system') { return $a == 'system' ? -1 : 1; } Declaring and calling a function also follows coding standards, which describes that the argument list should come before putting a space. Before the operating curly brackets, should also have space before it. Parameters may be part of a function, if this is the case, then, they should be separated by a comma, followed by a space. In Drupal, there are reserved words known as constants, which follow coding standards as well. Constant must always be capitalized in Drupal, some of them are: TRUE, FALSE , and NULL and as you can see they are capitalized. The known control structure items are: if, else, elseif, case, switch, for each, while, and do . According to Drupal coding standards, there should be after the control structure term, and another space, before the opening curly brackets. Like functions, the closing brackets are on their own line and the statement inside one of the curly brackets is indented two spaces. A Drupal website development project must have standardized documentation, as part of its development, to understand Drupal’s code better. When developers want to track what their code does, what variable it uses, what it returns, what to expect from the code, and what it returns, then he/she can always seek to well document their work. A developer’s code must be maintainable, by everyone and to ensure this take place, standardized documentation, must be used. Documentation can clear a lot of misunderstandings and confusions, because a description of what parts of the code are doing, such as a function or large blocks of code, can be given during documentation, in the form of comments. Documentation can be written to give developers who read someone else’s code an overview of what a file contains, or what a piece of code is doing. The Doc block is a block of information found at the top of a PHP file, or before each function, class definition or method. File doc block is also a block of information, which appears at the top of every PHP file, it is placed after a blank line and before another blank line. Tags can also be used in Drupal 8 documentation, they expected to go on a certain order, and indicate what a documentation in Drupal is all about.

It is no doubt that a world without principles and standards, would be a very scary place, because people wouldn’t be expected to perform to a level that is acceptable by others, when they do their jobs. Imagine for example, if you wait for a red light to turn green, and you are in a country where they don’t take traffic light too seriously. You could bear to wait there for two or maybe even three minutes, but if you wait for more than thirty minutes, then you will notice that there is something wrong with the picture. So what do you do at that point, do you break the law, or do you wait for a light, that you know will not change, before you go? In today’s article we are going to continue our conversation about Drupal on coding standards , and how you can improve your level of programming, if you learn to adhere to standards set by the Drupal community. Object-oriented programming (OOP) has become a large part of Drupal 8, which has introduced a lot of coding standards for the Drupal developer. When developers want to organize their code to be more efficient, then they can choose to write their code in OOP, to use the best features that PHP has to offer today. Procedural programming does not give developers the ability to reuse their code, in the form of objects, which can be created or instantiated and contain properties that hold data, and methods that execute function. Drupal only allow for one class per file, when declaring classes in OOP, the file name should be the same as the name of the class. In Drupal 8 there is a new feature known as PSR4 autoloader , which allow classes to be loaded on demand and automatically, but the naming convention should be followed. A long list of required statements is not necessary due to autoloading, because classes are named based on the PSR-4 namespacing convention and are used on demand due to the autoloading system. The naming of the classes and how files and directories are arranged is what really matters, for the PSR-4 autoloader to work properly. If you want your module to be autoloaded properly, you should follow this directory structure, according to drupilize.me. <modulename>/src/<namespace>. This file would contain a list of classes that are used, and inside the file the same coding standards should be follow, as far as spacing and indenting is concerned. When naming classes, certain basics must be cover, for example, UpperCamel must be used when declaring a class or interface. lowerCamel can be used when declaring a method or a class property, the word “Drupal” or “class” should not be used to name classes. In Drupal, interfaces are used often, to keep the code flexible, because it allows developers to swap classes out for another, at some point in the future of their development if it’s necessary of course. Developers use interfaces because they are flexible and allow them to implement different functionality, while sharing a common interface, this is known as polymorphism a OOP concept. Classes can be public, private or protected, to declare their visibility, which is a requirement. Thank you for reading this article!!!

Programming is part of developing websites, and when you use Drupal to develop your website, it would be a very good idea, to learn programming. In today’s article we are going to talk about Object-Oriented in PHP (OOP PHP or OO-PHP) in Drupal 8; which is a system of writing code, where developers are required to structure their code into reusable chunks of code. An object is a piece of code that does something for an application, for example, a wheel is part of the car and does something for the car, so that the car is usable; however, the wheel is not the car it just forms part of the car. Well objects function the same way, in the sense that they do something for the application, such connecting to a database or calling a service to perform an operation for the application. Complex applications such as Drupal, are better organized into classes or modular code. Classes can be used throughout a system, to keep things in order and well maintained. In order to understand how to implement custom functionality, the architecture of modules, and the various forms they can take, developers should have a solid understanding of OOP PHP. In Drupal 8 for example, OOP PHP is used heavily in its code base, because it provides so many benefits, such as maintainability and scalability. In the modern OO-PHP developers have at their disposal, things such as encapsulation, inheritance, interface, OO-PHP and design patterns, that developers can use to improve their skill. OO-PHP can better serve Drupal 8 to be a better tool for its users, so that developers can build better websites. Hopefully you already know PHP, because our discussion is focused more on Drupal 8 and all the technologies it has in order to better serve its users. We are going to talk now about YAML . The human-readable data serialization format, known as YAML, is heavily used in Drupal 8; therefore, if you’d like to use Drupal 8, you’d have to know and understand YAML syntax. YAML stands for YAML Ain’t Markup Language, although many people confuse this technology with a markup language. YAML is supported by many programming languages, it is similar to JSON, because it is a superset of JSON, which means that you can use JSON type syntax to write your YAML files. It makes sense for th Drupal 8 project to use YAML, because Symphony already uses it, and Drupal 8 is built on top of Symphony. All YAML files are represented as key, separator and the value, like this (name: Joe Shindelar). New lines and tabbed characters are syntactically important, and it can support different data types, such as string, int, float, Boolean, null and UNIX timestamp. Compound data types or collections are also supported in YAML, this is an associative array or a list. It is also important that you keep your indentation correct in a YAML file, so that it can be utilized by Drupal. Another important component of Drupal 8 is Symphony , which is written in PHP as an application framework that is used to build website applications. Reusable components are part of the Symphony framework, which are used by Drupal 8 core library. In Symphony there is a buzz word known as Bundles , which is a folder, where we put code, such as a feature that can do some registration validation stuff. Bundles can be used to put anything, such as PHP code, configuration files, templates, CSS files and other people’s bundles. Another very important component in Drupal 8, is Twig , which is the default template engine used in Drupal 8. As developers using Drupal 8, you’d need to know twig to make changes, to the output of your Drupal website pages. The PHP templating for Drupal 8, is used to output PHP variables inside HTML, by using double curly braces. So you’d set up your variable in your PHP file, then when you are ready to print it on your Twig template, then you would follow this syntax {{ variable_name }}, you can also use the {{% %}} to do something such as a for loop or a conditional statement, and if you want to comment something our you would use {{# #}}. Thank you for reading this article!!!

Website developers must continue to develop and sharpen their skills, for them to have an edge in this very competitive world. In today’s article, we will continue our conversation about Plugins in Drupal 8 so that we can implement one and know how to use them. A module developer should be using the Drupal console to do his/her development in Drupal 8 because that’s the Drupalize.me way. Common plugin types can be found through Drupal console’s commands, that developers can generate. If a developer would like to see a list of plugins that the Drupal console can generate, he/she can simply type the code below. drupal list generate: plugin You won’t have to deal with a lot of pertinent redundant code, that can be simply generated for you, and you can focus on development. A developer can also use an existing plugin and rename a few things to avoid boilerplate code. A developer should also know what plugin manager class is responsible for, and which plugin type, once he/she has a list of them, wants to use. The plugin manager will define a new plugin so that it can be listed and instances of the plugin of the defined type can be instantiated. The way that plugins of a type are discovered and instantiated is defined by the central controlling class known as the plugin manager. Any developer who wishes to invoke a plugin of any type can do so calling the plugin manager class directly inside of a module. A new plugin type can be created, by creating a new plugin manager. The place where the metadata of a single plugin instance is defined, as well as the method that will be used, for plugin discovery, is determined by plugin managers. The following code:

\Drupal\Component\Plugin\PluginManagerInterface,

Implements all plugin managers, and this piece of code extends these three pieces of code, which are the basis for any new plugin manager.

\Drupal\Component\Plugin\Discovery\DiscoveryInterface,                                                       \Drupal\Component\Plugin\Factory\FactoryInterface and,                                                      \Drupal\Component\Plugin\Mapper\MapperInterface.

The plugin.manager.* a piece of code is used to generate plugin manager services and from the service container, a copy of the plugin manager can be requested. Example:

$example_manager = \Drupal::service('plugin.manager.example');

Once a developer has identified the plugin manager needed, to complete a task, then that developer has to start, by locating the name of the plugin manager service he/she needs. The controller will be the place where, a developer can inject their plugin manager services, and this is the Drupal way of doing things. The code below is a controller file, located under custom_module/src/Controller, it is very important that you get those names and file directory correct, for Drupal to recognize your controller and plugin.

<?php                                                                                                            namespace Drupal\plugin_type_example\Controller;                                                                                                            use Drupal\Core\Controller\ControllerBase;                                                      use Drupal\plugin_type_example\SandwichPluginManager;                                                      use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerInterface;                                                                                                            /**                                                      * Controller for our example pages.                                                      */                                                      class PluginTypeExampleController extends ControllerBase {                                                        /**                                                         * The sandwich plugin manager.                                                         *                                                         * We use this to get all of the sandwich plugins.                                                         *                                                         * @var \Drupal\plugin_type_example\SandwichPluginManager                                                         */                                                        protected $sandwichManager;                                                        /**                                                         * Constructor.                                                         *                                                         * @param \Drupal\plugin_type_example\SandwichPluginManager $sandwich_manager                                                         *   The sandwich plugin manager service. We're injecting this service so that                                                         *   we can use it to access the sandwich plugins.                                                         */                                                        public function __construct(SandwichPluginManager $sandwich_manager) {                                                          $this->sandwichManager = $sandwich_manager;                                                        }                                                         /**                                                         * {@inheritdoc}                                                         *                                                         * Override the parent method so that we can inject our sandwich plugin                                                         * manager service into the controller.                                                         *                                                         * For more about how dependency injection works read https://www.drupal.org/node/2133171                                                         */                                                        public static function create(ContainerInterface $container) {                                                          // Inject the plugin.manager.sandwich service that represents our plugin                                                          // manager as defined in the plugin_type_example.services.yml file.                                                          return new static($container->get('plugin.manager.sandwich'));                                                        }                                                      }

All defined plugins have information that can aid our application development to move forward faster. All that information from defined plugins is available to developers when they can make calls to the getDefinitions method. Enabled modules, can be used to locate all plugin definitions of the type in question, through the discovery handler . When the discovery handler is not used to retrieve data, then the DefaultPluginManager is used to retrieve the data from the cache if the data is available there. A good example of is in the code below, watch how the definitions of a plugin can be obtained in the code.

// Get the list of all the sandwich plugins defined on the system from the                                                      // plugin manager. Note that at this point, what we have is *definitions* of                                                      // plugins, not the plugins themselves.                                                      $sandwich_plugin_definitions = $this->sandwichManager->getDefinitions();                                                      // Let's output a list of the plugin definitions we now have.                                                      $items = array();                                                      foreach ($sandwich_plugin_definitions as $sandwich_plugin_definition) {                                                       // Here we use various properties from the plugin definition. These values                                                       // are defined in the annotation at the top of the plugin class: see                                                       // \Drupal\plugin_type_example\Plugin\Sandwich\ExampleHamSandwich.                                                        $items[] = t("@id (calories: @calories, description: @description )", array(                                                          '@id' => $sandwich_plugin_definition['id'],                                                          '@calories' => $sandwich_plugin_definition['calories'],                                                          '@description' => $sandwich_plugin_definition['description'],                                                        ));                                                      }                                                      // Add our list to the render array.                                                      $build['plugin_definitions'] = array(                                                        '#theme' => 'item_list',                                                        '#title' => 'Sandwich plugin definitions',                                                        '#items' => $items,                                                      );

When a list of plugin types is desired by a developer he/she may want to use the method above to accomplish this task. The unique ID of a plugin can be utilized in order to retrieve the definition of the plugin in question, calling the getDefinition($plugin_id) method. // If we want just a single plugin definition, we can use getDefinition(). // This requires us to know the ID of the plugin we want. This is set in the // annotation on the plugin class: see \Drupal\plugin_type_example\Plugin\Sandwich\ExampleHamSandwich. $ham_sandwich_plugin_definition = $this->sandwichManager->getDefinition('meatball_sandwich'); In order to instantiate and use an individual plugin object, the createInstance($plugin_id) method can be used. It is not good practice to instantiate a plugin object directly, instead, the plugin manager should be used to do so. Understanding how instances of a plugin are created requires that you see it in action, in the code below.

// To get an instance of a plugin, we call createInstance() on the plugin                                                      // manager, passing the ID of the plugin we want to load. Let's output a                                                      // list of the plugins by loading an instance of each plugin definition and                                                      // collecting the description from each.                                                      $items = array();                                                      // The array of plugin definitions is keyed by plugin id, so we can just use                                                      // that to load our plugin instances.                                                      $sandwich_plugin_definitions = $this->sandwichManager->getDefinitions();                                                      foreach ($sandwich_plugin_definitions as $plugin_id => $sandwich_plugin_definition) {                                                       // We now have a plugin instance. From here on it can be treated just as                                                       // any other object; have its properties examined, methods called, etc.                                                        $plugin = $this->sandwichManager->createInstance($plugin_id);                                                        $items[] = $plugin->description();                                                      }

All the code on this tutorial was taken from Drupalize.me. Thank you for reading this article!!!