6 Things Every New Drupal 8 Developer Should Know

Have you just entered the Drupal 8 horizon? Being familiar with the Drupal platform, and having developed websites and applications with Drupal 7 will definitely help you with Drupal 8. Apart from knowing your Drupal 7, you also need to familiarize with the modern PHP frameworks and their practices in order to familiarize with Drupal 8. Drupal 8 is a slightly different platform, and if you are considering Drupal 8 Web Development, then here are a few things you need to consider while doing so.

Get Briefed on Object Oriented Programming

There is a big difference between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 in the way the code is written. Though the code for Drupal 8 is still written in PHP, there is a slight difference. You will find shadows of Object Oriented Programming more prevalent in the Drupal 8 coding practices. While the Global Procedural Functions are still in action, you will find that Drupal 8 abides to classes for logic development. If you want go get started with Drupal 8 development, then you need to first know more on Object Oriented Programming to tackle development in a more proficient manner.

Get Started with Composer

Modernizing the PHP framework led to the development of Composer Package Manager, which takes care of installing, updating and managing all the dependencies involved in a single project. It is also one of the best autoloaders. But, Drupal 8 uses composer, when it comes to handling PHP libraries as well as dependencies. This simply means you should know how to use composer, and should begin using it for non-Drupal projects too!

Increase Familiarity with Symfony

Drupal 8 was introduced with Symfony components, which was indeed a great shift for majority of Drupal developers. It is indeed important to know basics of Symfony if you want to get started with Drupal 8. It is one of the best modular frameworks of the recent times, and if you know the concepts of Drupal 8 you will have a great time working on developing a website with Drupal 8.

Knowledge of Routing and Controllers

When you are dirtying your hands with learning Drupal 8, you should ideally begin with developing the "Hello World" module. With this you will learn the following things in detail

Module Folder Structure

Routing (no more of the hook_menu) while using the routing.yml files

Use of controller classes that are mapped to routes

Access arguments for these routes

These are just some of the things you gain from developing this module on Drupal 8.

Familiarizing with Plugins

You need to familiarize yourself with the plugins that you might need when working on website development with Drupal 8. You get a basic understanding related to Drupal 8 functionality if you understand the plugins. There are some functionality changes in Drupal 8 plugins.

Know Dependency Injection Concept

Drupal 8 utilizes the Symfony Dependency Injection which will help manage the service instantiation. With this you can decouple the functionality and increase the testability standards for this framework. It is always good to understand this concept, even if you don’t really go into the depths of it.