Release Day: The Drupal Recipes API

We recently completed a new set of tutorials covering the Drupal Recipe API. My interest in Drupal recipes began while I was working on documentation for the Drupal CMS User Guide, which relies heavily on recipes to provide its features. Drupal CMS is just Drupal core plus a curated set of contributed modules, preconfigured to deliver common features following best practices—and recipes are what make that possible.

Aside: Drupal CMS calls them “recomended add-ons” but behind the scenes they’re recipes. If you’re curious to see recipes in action install Drupal CMS and enable one or more of the recommended add-ons.

Recipes (see the Recipes initiative) are a way to package up configuration that can be applied to a Drupal site. Much like the recipes in a cookbook provide instructions for how to prepare a meal, Drupal recipes provide instructions for how to prepare a feature. Combine a few recipes and you’ve got the makings of a feast (or a CMS tailored to your specific needs).

Recipes allow experienced Drupal developers to package up their knowledge and share it with others. They also allow site builders to apply recipes to their sites without needing to understand the underlying configuration. If you’ve built a Drupal site before, you’ve probably configured a content type for blog posts or events, and added Views to display those items. In fact, you’ve probably done this multiple times across multiple sites. Over time, you develop patterns and best practices—approaches to configuring Drupal that work well for your clients or your team. Recipes give you a way to capture those patterns, share them, and reuse them again and again.

The result: faster development and more time for site builders to focus on what’s unique about their site—and the value they bring to their clients.

In this course, we’ll dive into the Drupal Recipe API and explore how to create and use recipes to capture the patterns and best practices you’ve developed—saving you time and effort in the long run.

Explore the Drupal Recipes course now.

What you’ll learn

This course contains content for both site builders and developers. Site builders will learn how to apply recipes to their sites, while developers will learn how to create and use recipes.

We cover:

• What Recipes are and the problem they aim to solve
• The Configuration Actions API
• How to find and apply a recipe
• The anatomy of a recipe, and how to create your own recipes
• How to discover and use existing configuration actions in a recipe
• How to define custom configuration actions

Tutorials in this course

Check out the full course here: Drupal Recipes.

We’d love to hear what you think! Share your feedback with us in the comments, or let us know what else you’d like to see in future tutorials.