Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 11 ■ Drupal Modules
Views
Views is either the first or second module that comes to mind when you ask experienced Drupal developers
what their most favorite module is. The Views module is like a Swiss army knife for selecting and rendering
content on your site. An example of how you might use views is a case where you created 50 pieces of
content, each item describing a news event that occurred in the past. You may have a requirement to list
those 50 items sorted by the date that each story was published. Views can do that for you. Additionally you
may want the list of news articles to be listed in tabular format, like an Excel spreadsheet. Views can do that
for you. You may also want to provide visitors with a page that lists the news article as a table with the ability
to sort the articles by clicking one of the titles in the table view of articles. Views can do that for you. You can
also provide a filtering mechanism so visitors can pick a subject, person, or location associated with all of
your news stories and only see those articles that meet the selected criteria. Views can do that for you. You
may also want to provide an RSS feed of the news articles to visitors who use feed aggregators. Views can
do that for you. Views is an amazingly easy-to-use module that is extremely powerful and a “must have” on
nearly everyone’s list, and the good news is that it’s part of Drupal 8 core. Chapter 9 describes in detail how
to use Views.
Layout
A close second to Views in popularity is the Layout module. As we placed blocks on pages in Chapter 8, you
saw that we were limited to putting blocks into the regions defined by the Bartik theme that we were using.
But what if we wanted to divide the content area into rows and columns so that we can create landing pages
with lots of elements? The Layout module comes to the rescue. For advanced page layouts, there isn’t a tool
that is easier to use and more powerful than the Layout module. Chapter 10 describes how to use Layouts.
Rules
The Rules module enables administrators to define conditionally executed actions based on events. For
example, if you want to send an e-mail automatically to a content administrator every time a comment is
posted to the site, for the administrator’s review and approval, you can use Rules to configure that action.
Display Suite
Display Suite gives you a drag-and-drop interface that allows you to take full control over how your content
is displayed. Arrange your nodes, views, comments, and user data the way you want without having to walk
through dozens of template files.
Nicemenus
Drupal’s out-of-the-box menu features provide an easy-to-use mechanism for creating horizontal and
vertical menus, where those menus are restricted to a single level. In many cases you’ll want to have the
ability to create menus that have drop-downs (for horizontal menus) or fly-outs (for vertical menus).
Drupal’s menuing system provides the ability to assign menu items in a hierarchical fashion; however, it is
up to us, Drupal developers, to format menus so that items drop down or fly out when a user hovers over
a menu item. Fortunately, we have the Nicemenus module that automatically handles the rendering of
drop-downs and fly-outs.
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