Why this course?

Description

Drupal is a powerful content management system, and as such it comes with a lot of functionality. But what if you want to add some custom features? Maybe you want to add an API for your customers to interact with your site, or maybe you want to connect your site to third-party services like Slack or Twitter.

To do this, you'll need to use Drupal's web services module. The web services module gives you the ability to connect Drupal 8 sites with other applications using HTTP requests and responses. Starting with Drupal 8 and continuing with Drupal 9, has a rapidly developing and powerful toolset for working with web services. More and more sites are moving to a decoupled CMS architecture. Even if you are not creating a fully decoupled site, exposing aspects of your site through a web service API is a common task in modern web development. This series will teach you everything you need to know in order to use Drupal core and contributed modules to build a web services API with Drupal as the backend.

This course looks at important topics regarding the architecture of your API like presentation versus content, security, and documentation. It also examines common pitfalls in REST APIs and how to address them in order to ensure consistency and performance. Throughout the course the examples are primarily focused on creating a REST API that uses the JSON API specification, but the concepts apply equally well to GraphQL or other formats.

For the purpose of this course, we are going to talk about APIs as the collection of features provided by Drupal modules that allow us to read and write content (nodes, taxonomy terms, users, etc.) and configuration (blocks, menus, permissions, etc.) using HTTP messages. During the course of this series, we will assume some level of familiarity with HTTP concepts such as its methods (often called verbs) and headers. However, we'll provide links to additional resources for these concepts along the way, just in case you need a refresher.