Theming Strategies In Context

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Overriding a template should only be done when you need major, site-wide structural changes to a page's, node's, or block's template file such as adding or removing regions because the changes will apply to ALL use-cases of those files. Smaller, less structural - but still site wide - changes can be applied through theme functions and lastly, fine-tuned and case specific changes can be applied through theme hook suggestions. But that's just the tip of the iceberg for all the theming strategies available to you.

These kinds of distinctions are exactly what I am trying to clarify in this overview comparing the many, many different theming strategies used by Drupal themers and which are alluded to in the book “The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7,” by Melancon et al (which the page #’s reference) and to a lesser extent, “Beginning Drupal 7″ by Todd Tomlinson. I am told that as an open source system there are no hard and fast rules for using one theming strategy over another in any given circumstance so my goal is to organize everything as best as possible into an easy to understand context in order to compare and develop well-informed personal preferences and maybe even codify some best practices. That is, I am more interested in the when and why rather than the how.

I’m still learning Drupal and began compiling this information as a study guide rather than as a knowledgeable expert in the field, so if anyone out there can offer any suggestions or elaborate on the information here, particularly in the list of most common/practical examples offered for each technique, feel free to improve this wiki.



Modifying Contents, Structure, and Placement of Elements

The Basic page content type provides you with a text field for entering the title of the content item, and a body text area. The body field is flexible and can contain whatever the author feels like writing about.

  • Write an entire book in the body field, including HTML markup (headings, tables, CSS, and so on).
  • Insert pictures.
  • Write a single sentence.

An article is identical to a basic page with the single exception that an article has an image upload feature and an additional field where the author can enter what are called tags. Tags are simply words that help classify, organize, and search for related content on your site.

Custom Content Types and Fields are good when you want to:

  • Require that certain information is entered before the author submits the content item for publishing; for example the start date and time for an event, the address of the venue where the event is being held, and a link to the event on a Google map.
  • Have the ability to perform calculations based on the information that is captured in a content item.
  • Have the ability to sort content items by specific “fields.”
  • Have the ability to “filter” or restrict which content items are displayed on a page based on a value in a field.
  • Enforce the structure of how a piece of content is rendered on a page; for example, you may want to display information about a book and want the title to be followed by the author, followed by the ISBN, followed by the price, followed by the description of the book.

A block is a generic term that is applied to any self-contained piece of content, menu, or code. Standard blocks that come with Drupal include the login block, the search block, the “who’s online” block, the “who’s new” block, the latest blog postings block, and more. There are also blocks that come with contributed modules, such as blocks that share the latest weather report, your recent Twitter posts, or your current Facebook status. As a site administrator, you can construct your own custom blocks

Views provides an easy-to-use tool for selecting and displaying lists of content on your website. It is essentially a smart query builder that can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. Examples of how you might use Views include:

  • Displaying the most recent news articles posted to your website, sorted in descending order by the date of posting.
  • Displaying a list of company locations as a table that is sortable by clicking on the titles for the location name, city, state, and country.
  • Displaying a list of blog postings that is filterable by subject.
  • Creating an RSS feed that lists the most recent content posted on your website.
  • Displaying just about any kind of list that you can think of, created from the content that is stored on your website, as a list, table, or RSS feed.

Panels are useful when you want to divide a region into multiple “mini-regions” called panel panes. *

Alter Hooks (p 323), ex: dynamically add HTML for new small bit of content into a region, moving content from one region to another based on certain circumstances, and changing the contents of tabs based on certain circumstances. **

render(), hide(), and show() (p 327), selectively renders bits of content, such as fields, inside theme functions, templates and pre/process functions. Ex: render() is essentially an implementation of a render array **, hiding part or all of a render element to allow them to be placed outside of a div, hiding content based on certain circumstances, show() reverts a previously applied hide(), render() can be used multiple times. ***

*Views can be used with panel panes to define what content should be rendered, how many items should be included in the list, and how those items should be rendered. Using Taxonomy, content authors select the appropriate taxonomy term that is associated with each panel pane, and the content automatically appears in the right spot on the right page.

** Render Arrays are structered arrays that contain nested data and other information that drupal uses to render HTML (p 321) they are similar to theme hooks in that they use template and theme functions but they are modified using alter hooks (323).

***It’s best to do these operations in preprocess or process functions in order to keep your templates clean and more manageable (329).



STYLING

Define Stylesheets via the .info file (p 343), to be loaded for all pages.

drupal_add_css() to conditionally load stylesheets (p 344), ex: to dynamically print as an “inline” block of css code within the tag, stylesheets for single pages, specifying the weight of a file to control the order that it loads, conditional stylesheets that target specific browsers, loading external stylesheets, excluding a CSS file from the aggregation and compression process. *

hook_css_alter() to remove or override CSS files provided by modules and core (p 345).

*Enabling aggregation and compression for CSS files (admin/config/development/performance) on all live sites is highly recommended, as it will speed up page loads quite a bit (341).



Adding, Removing and Modifying Variables

Preprocess Functions (p 314) allows running theming logic before templates and theme functions are used. Preprocess Functions are normally used to add or tweak variables* available in template files, for example to provide the $subject variable in block.tpl.php. Ex: dynamically adding CSS classes to variables (such as regions) as opposed to overriding a template, hiding links in certain situations, modifying the portion of content that is to be viewed in certain situations, and to create a custom variable to input a link for a type of user (318). **

Process Functions (p 314) ex: adding, removing, hiding, and modifying variables in certain circumstances “later in the processing cycle.” **

*use devel module’s dpm() function to determine all the available variables to work within each theme hook p.311

** These functions are run prior to the template being displayed, thereby allowing you to manipulate the variables for use in the templates themselves.



Modifying HTML Markup

Theme Hook Suggestions p.305 – progressively traverse drupal’s template/theme function/block specificity to target a specific template/theme function/block for one-off specific changes.

Theme Functions* p.301 – are used to dress data in markup, as an alternative to template files. Normally used for small, but site-wide, changes to form elements, fields, menu items, and adding/modifying content to blocks (p301) See: http://api.drupal.org/api/group/themeable/7

Template Overrides** p.293 – major site-wide changes to structure of a page, nodes, blocks, or to add/remove regions*** (291)

*These are theme specific, meaning if the site employs more than one theme it will not apply.

** The block.tpl.php file, for example, is used when a block is being rendered. Template files can be overridden by copying them into your own theme. It is also possible to make specific overrides with naming conventions, such as block–user.tpl.php.

*** Regions play a large part in defining the high-level structure of HTML markup. Typical regions include the header, footer, sidebars, and content, most of a site’s content is output inside these regions.

(if you find this wiki to be lacking or outdated we apologize and encourage you to contribute your own knowledge and research to the wiki)

Note: This was originally a post on my blog: www.projectdesignportfolio.com