Mastering Drupal 8

Plugins

One of the wonderful things about Drupal is how easy it makes it to add new functionality to the platform. In Drupal 7, you would implement an info hook to define your new component and then another one or more hooks to handle the actual functionality. For example, to create a new block you would implement hook_block_info to return an array of blocks defined by your module, and then hook_block_view, hook_block_configure, and so on, to handle the individual interactions with each block. In Drupal 8, these additions are handled as plugins. There are a number of plugin types defined by Drupal 8 core, including:

• Blocks: Pieces of content and functionality that are shown around the main page content
• Entities: Different types of content, ...