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We all know that Symfony is already in the core of Drupal 8 but how it works and how both systems work? Not that many people understand fully this integration. Me neither but I would like to pubilsh my research notes about how Drupal 8 works now. Surely this material is based on the snapshot of beginning September and I really hope that more things will happen so this information is relevant only for some time. I have little experience of the building projects with Symfony so my knowledge is very close to majority of drupal developers. So lets start. First changes we see in index.php that bootstrap is done on the level of DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_CODE instead of DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL like in Drupal 7. From documentation about phases of bootstrap of Drupal 8 we can see that phase that "initialize language, path, theme, and modules" is not done yet. Next thing we see that we instantiate object of the DrupalKernel class (inherits from Symfony Kernel class) Kernel class in Symf...

In my experience, there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding how Drupal caching works. I'm not talking about advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish, APC or memcache here, I'm talking about the core Drupal caching: page cache and block cache which are available in Drupal 7 core. Drupal 6 is similar but works a but differently because page caching was simplified for Drupal 7 (e.g. aggresive mode is now a available as a settings.php var) and the entire system also has become pluggable. Everybody knows this screen and the settings. But what do they exactly mean? What difference do they actually make? What do they do? Here is an attempt to explain the settings at '/admin/config/development/performance' . Page Caching: If enables, page caching will only be used for anonymous users. If you enable page caching, the entire HTML of each page will be stored in the database. This significantly reduces the amount of queries needed. This automatically means that bl...

Views 2 provides a well structured theming environment allowing presentation control for each element of your view. And in my humble opinion, it rocks! Those with no past experience with Views 1 will find Views 2 uses standard PHPTemplate theming techniques. All of your experience theming Drupal can be used with Views. Views 1 themers starting with Views 2 might be a bit confused at first. I was. The single callback in template.php where everything happened is gone, refactored into a consistent framework of template files. All of the freedom that existed in the single function still exists with the added benefit of a well defined structure Overview: Views handles querying the database and organizing the information for display. It creates the output display by converting retrieved data into variables and passing them through a series of templates. Each template handles a different "level" of output creation. The number of templates used to create a view's output depen...