Drupal

It is common to wish to remove the time of day shown in the node “submitted” line. In Drupal 5, there were no less than three ways to achieve this, and I will present these when I'm done covering date formatting for Drupal 6. Drupal 6 allows you to modify the different formats for dates in the Administration area of your site, these different formats being small, medium and large — yep, just like pizza, oh... my... god... You could do the same in Drupal 5. However, you then had to pick among a finite list of options. In Drupal 6, you can create an nth option, if you like none of the options presented to you. Read more →

Administrators are shown with a themable marker whether content is new or has been updated in the Administration section of their site at webSite.com/admin/content/node. Additionally, in node lists, the module tracker informs any logged-in user if he or she hasn't read a particular (recently created) node (using the marker new), or if a node he/she's read already was modified (using the marker updated). You, the themer, may want everyone, including “anonymous users”, to be informed of updates to nodes right inside their content. This information may specify who last edited the node and when. Note that the last editor of a content may not be the creator of that content, and I'll take this into account in my “solution”. In the following theming tweak, you'll add Last edited by name some time ago information to your nodes' content. Read more →

In Wordpress, unlike in Drupal, terms are not lumped together in posts. Each Wordpress vocabulary has its own “template tag”, and the ones that come out-of-the box are: the_tags(), and the_category(). The following theming tweak is about putting order in Drupal terms before they're output to screen. It you need to break up your terms by vocabulary before you display them, read on.  Read more →

You want to add quick edit links to the teaser view of your nodes — one link to edit the node, and another to delete it, and you want these links to be shown only to users with the 'administer nodes' permission. Alternatively, you may want these links to be viewed only by the user with uid (user ID) 1. Read more →

You want to print the content type name along with the 'submitted' info. This will be particularly useful for those who have created custom content types, with or without CCK. Read more →

You want the comment style to be different for comments added by the author of a node — who's commenting on his own node. For example, you may want to highlight the node's author's comments, so that any visitor skimming through the comments will easily differentiate them from other comments. Read more →

Here is a collection of my 10 favorite 'tweaks' to content template files in Drupal 6. I will add one simple tweak a day, starting today.

You can use the path module to force a simple redirect in Drupal. Say you have a Drupal site with only one blog. When people access the page myWebsite.com/blog, you may actually want them to see the page at myWebsite.com/blog/x where x is the ONE blogger user hi-dee. (The page at myWebsite.com/blog has for title Blogs.) A simple redirect is achievable using the path module, part of the default Drupal distribution. Read more →

The following exercise consists in theming the contact form in Drupal 6. Once we're done, it will look like we'll have created two fall-back-on 'pages' for contact forms, one page/form to 'request a quote' at Randy.com/contact/quote, and an other page/form for general inquiries at Randy.com/contact/info. The trick here — if there's one — consists in theming the contact form differently based on the requested URI.

This exercise will show you how to:

• recognize when a module has not registered a specific theming function for a form it generates,
• register a theming function for a Drupal form in your theme, using HOOK_theme,
• work with template suggestions,
• use the Devel module function dsm() to inspect complex variables, such as Drupal forms.

 Read more →

The attached ebook, Files in Drupal, has been expanded and updated to account for changes in Drupal 6.
— Update, May 10th, 2008.

You'll find in the pdf document attached to this posting “10 things you ought to know” about file download in Drupal, from a developer’s perspective. This small guide provides sample code, recipes, concise yet complete explanations, tricks, and a thorough coverage of the module hook function file_download. The document is 6 11 16 17 pages long, it has been expanded and updated to account for changes in Drupal 5 and 6. I also added a 'funny' cover to the book. (My modest attempt at humour.) Typos are corrected pretty much on a daily basis... If you’ve downloaded the document before May 17th, 2008, please redownload it. Read more →