Drupal 8 - Plugin API

When we create our custom plugins in Drupal 8, we sometimes need them to be executed in a particular order.

For example, if we would run a text analyzer that finds frequencies of words and frequent phrases, we would first want to run the HTML filter which strips out all tags and/or special characters and then execute the text analyzer. Whatever the reason be, Drupal 8 default plugin manager Drupal\Core\Plugin\DefaultPluginManager has a method called getDefinitions.

This post demonstrates usage of a Drupal custom search API processor for generating generic search result descriptions. Search API supports custom plugins which can be executed at different stages to manipulate search query, fields, data indexing, etc.