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Art of writing template files - Drupal 8

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When it comes to Drupal 8 theming layer, there is a lot Drupal 8 offers. Few concepts that come to mind while thinking of Drupal 8 theme layer include Renderable Array, Cacheabilty, Cache Context, Cache Tags, Twig and Preprocessors. Some of these are improvements of old concepts, while others are new introduction in Drupal 8. In this post, I'll share my experience on how to best utilise these concepts for a robust and performant frontend with Drupal 8.

To get best out of this post, you should be comfortable with:

  1. Drupal 8 #cache
  2. Twig Debug
  3. Preprocessor functions

We will focus on the following concepts:

Renderable array caching, walk through Drupal 8 caching power and Cache contexts

Drupal 8 comes with a lot of changes and almost all of us are even familiar with these changes. So, now it’s high time we start exploiting these to get best out of Drupal 8. It’s very important to understand how Drupal 8 caching works. Go through drupal.org documentation besides implementing the same once thoroughly on a vanilla Drupal instance. At the end have an answer to all these questions:

  • What is a renderable array?
  • Understand that every renderable array is cacheable.
  • One Renderable array can consist of other renderable arrays (nesting):
    So it’s like, a page is a renderable array which actually consists of other renderable arrays: region (renderable) arrays and in a region, we can have block (renderable array). The main point to understand here is hierarchy and nesting and the caching among this.
    Reference: https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/api/render-api/cacheability-of-render-arrays
  • Making use of cache context:
    A general mistake I have seen many of us perform is using

#cache = max-age => -1

There come few scenarios where we cannot use direct caching but that particular array can be cached on per user/URL basis. Especially for those cases, we have cache contexts. It’s very easy concept and you would love once you start using this, there are several other bases on which you can decide cache-ability of a renderable array.
Reference: https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/api/cache-api/cache-contexts
 

Selection of template files/preprocessor functions and placement of the same.

With great flexibility, comes responsibility. Most of the time, we come across scenarios where we need to do tweaks to field output based on certain requirements. Drupal provides us handful of ways to do so, an important point here is to know and analyze what will be the best way to achieve expected results for the case. So, generally, we follow the following rule for customizations:

Tweak data -> Use Preprocess level alter
Tweak Markup -> Use Twig level customizations

Hence, when we have to do some custom work where we have to alter data conditionally, we make use of preprocessor functions. Consider overriding display of date field value based on certain conditions. In that case, a general approach we may take is to write hook_preprocess_field. But we need to consider that this preprocessor will run for all fields, which will definitely affect the performance. In this case, writing a specific preprocessor for date field makes more sense.

One more important thing regarding hook_preprocess_HOOK:

Consider a scenario, where we are using node.html.twig for node and then we have to do some alteration for a specific content type teaser view.

drupal8-twig

In that case creating specific twig and then using the specific preprocessor (node__content_type__teaser) for alteration is an extra step, instead, we can directly use the preprocessor hook_node__content_type__teaser without writing the specific twig file. So, for a generic twig, we can make use of specific hooks as suggested by twig debug too which definitely gives better performance.

Regarding placement of these preprocessors, it is completely based on the project requirement and usage. We place them in the module, in case the functionality to be provided should work on a modular approach. Placement of Preprocessors will work both in module and theme, while for twig files placing them in the module may need hook_theme_registery_alter based on the twig file we are overriding.

Use of Drupal Attributes

It’s not recommended to hardcode drupal attributes (HTML attributes like id, class) in twig files and the reason for this is: there are several modules which perform alteration of drupal attributes and make use of Drupal attributes and will no longer work if we hard code this. One example I can think of is Schema.org module which provides RDF mapping through attributes only.

Moreover, I would always suggest doing styling based on default classes provided by Drupal. Drupal by default provides appropriate classes both generic and specific and id for better styling. It is our duty, to make better use of them by understanding Drupal way. It also helps in saving project time and cost especially when we are following best practices and Drupal way of doing things. Drupal Core and Contrib are the best examples of how to proceed further on this. Also, following a proper structure makes possible use of styling written in Drupal core itself.

Logic in template/twig files - Yes/No?

In Drupal 7 To speed up the output process, it’s always recommended to avoid writing logic in template files. Instead, as discussed earlier consider writing preprocessors for this purpose. But with Drupal 8 adopting Twig Theme Engine things are different now. Doing tradeoff among the twig and preprocess (PHP) is mainly centric over performance concerns. We basically need our site to be faster. Drupal 7 PHP Engine used PHP theme engine and hence we recommended avoiding logic in template files, but in D8 with twig into effect, we have a faster theme engine with several twig filters, functions to be used. So, here we categorize our logic in 2 ways based on the type of work to be accomplished: soft logic and hard logic.

Soft Logic: Consider a scenario where we need to display comma separated values. Now, in this case, instead of writing a preprocessor for altering data we should use available twig filter "safe_join". It is definitely faster than the traditional way of using PHP preprocessor.

Hard Logic: In the above case, let's say if the value is taxonomy term and we need to print all the parent taxonomy term too. Then we need to load parent terms and we can then join them for final display, then this preprocessing should go in preprocessor only.
 

Frontend / Backend Collaboration

One more important thing I’ve observed is, it is very important to have a good collaboration between frontend and backend developers during the project. Sometimes as a frontend developer we come across weird requirements, in that case, it is very important to sit together to understand requirements and get the things done in the Drupal way to achieve best out of Drupal.

Also, go through this official guide to understand best practices for Drupal theming: https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/theming/twig/twig-best-practices-preprocess-functions-and-templates

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