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GSoC’17 Coding period | Week #1 | Drupal




The Coding phase of Google Summer of Code 2017 kicked off the previous week on May 30th, 16:00 UTC, marking the conclusion of the one-month long Community Bonding period. As stated earlier in my previous post, the Community Bonding term proffered the selected students an opportunity to build a rapport with their community, helping them in interacting with the respective mentors and fellow developers.

Presently, I am working on porting the UC Wish list module to Drupal 8, under the guidance of Naveen Valecha, which would specifically allow customers to create and administer personalized wish lists of products in their Ubercart store, thereby enabling potential customers to get a better understanding by referring to those wishlists. During the community bonding phase, I had been asked to create a Plan issue for tracking the status of the port and sub-issues of the project goals, by my mentor. As per the implementation, for the first phase/month of the coding period, I plan to successfully port the following sub-modules:
Therefore, briefly stating the work done the earlier week:
  • Learnt the implementation Form API for the creation, submission & validation of forms (eg:- wish list email) and Search API for executing a functional and effective search.
  • Learnt the employment of the Database API to provide a structured interface for the dynamic construction of queries to implement the second sub-module port and to check whether a wish list is private.
  • Conversion of D7 Hook functions to D8 APIs involving Routes, to define the path to Controllers (page callbacks in D7) or to create tabs and/or contextual links. This was done by creating the corresponding YAML files required and converting the D7 hook_menu() implementations by defining the routes in YAML format, through the routing.yml file.

  • Directory structure:

  • Learnt the verification procedure for email address of an user through the Data Common API.
  • Created a basic controller for the module for converting page/access callbacks for routes, to proper Controller classes. Also, learnt about the creation and application of YAML files and blogged about it.
As stated above, I was able to get a significant understanding of the project and the sub-modules considered for the initial phase. Moreover, I also came across some vital changes in D8 in contrast to its previous functionalities.
  • The .info files in D7 are replaced by .info.yml files. The .info files contained the basic information regarding the respective module.
  • The D7 variables have been converted to the D8 state system. The previous versions had variable_get and variable_set functions to store variables and their default configurations. They are, at present removed from D8 and replaced by the Configuration API.
  • Symfony framework  is used in D8 in the Controller file.. It has MVC architecture. This makes the code easy to maintain, scale, and reuse.
Summing up, these were some of the objectives and concepts learnt during the first week of coding phase in GSoC’17. Hope to learn many more new concepts in the coming weeks for successful completion of the port.

Cheers!

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