Drupal

Quick theme tip: abusing Drupal's $mission variable

Nik — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:20:45 -0400

Just a quick tip for an extra, more accessible theming variable. I have personally found that on nearly all the sites I’ve built, I’ve never had a use for the Mission variable. So it struck me that I could probably use this field to output something else; something relevant to the general workings of the site, for sure though.

Three tips for comment theming in Drupal

Nik — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 06:09:30 -0400

Today I’m just demonstrating a few simple theme adjustments to comments. Comments in Drupal 5 are “not sexy”, out of the box, so in this short post I’m going to illustrate how to:

change the text on “submitted” lines in comments (just a little)
add nofollow to username links – unless you’re feeling generous

remove the “not verified” marker from anonymous users

Theming the $links variable in Drupal nodes

Nik — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:05:47 -0500

This snippet of code gives a brief example of how to rewrite components of the $links variable to make them prettier :) Specifically, here I’m overwriting the link generated by the Forward module. You can see the result below: the little envelope icon labelled “Email”. Normally, this would just say “Forward this page”, which is a bit… well, it could be better. Obviously, it’s nice to be able to change these things to taste.

Creating custom error pages in Drupal

Nik — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:28:43 -0500

Currently there are three options for creating error pages in the Drupal system, that I know of. I’m going to show here which I think is the best, for reasons of usability, performance and general webmaster sanity. At the foot of this article, there’s some free code too!

The options:

Drupal’s built-in support for error pages (@ /admin/settings/error-reporting)
Search404.module (404’s only, of course)

Customerror.module (404 & 403)

Drupal’s build in error page support

Adding website section images in Drupal themes

Nik — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 14:06:26 -0500

Quite frequently I’ve been asked about putting images into site “sections”, depending on path or menu trail. Look up, that “Blog” image is what I’m talking about. It’s on all blog related pages. So, here goes – it’s nice to be able to finally offer this information here.

The first main chunk of code attempts to get a menu item and build an image link from that. The second chunk assumes failure of the first and tries again using a partial path method.

Millions of tiny blue aliens unleashed - Drupal 6 ALIVE!

Nik — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:38:15 -0500

Yesterday afternoon, I popped my head onto the Drupal IRC channels, and suddenly everything went a bit strange…

Somebody shouted, “Drupal 6 is out!” – and then the whole place erupted into hysterical blogging and Digg-ing (over 1000 now) and general chaos. Millions of tiny blue aliens are unleashed – Drupal 6 is ALIVE!

Protecting your Drupal site with security updates

Nik — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:23:00 -0500

I’ve read a scare story recently concerning a blogger having his site overtaken by hackers. It’s not the first one I’ve come across either. If you’re using a third party web development agency, then I suggest you have a word with them and make sure you’re “protected”.

Where do I create PHPTemplate variables in Drupal theming?

Nik — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:54:31 -0500

Here’s some code, which you can put into your template.php file. It demonstrates how to insert code into that file, so you can make new variables available to page, node and comment template files. Examples of where this is useful are shown in the snippet below.

uid > 0) ? TRUE : FALSE; break; case 'node':

How to make unwanted Drupal CSS disappear!

Nik — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:27:40 -0500

I sometimes run into people on the Drupal IRC channels that have a theming issue they just can’t fathom – dysfunctional CSS. Some poor guy has overridden a core CSS class, but his styles just don’t work. I’ve been there myself before and I know it can be very frustrating.

Rather than showering your CSS with !important tags, here is an alternative – remove the offending style file altogether. You can then copy the style information into your own theme, remove any bits that you don’t want and alter it as you see fit.

Speed up Drupal 5 load times with Javascript aggregation

Nik — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 06:58:15 -0500

Recently released – a Javascript aggregator module for Drupal 5. This function is included in core in Drupal 6, but users of 5.x are left hanging on. Enter, the Javascript Aggregator module.

I put this onto my own site straight away to test it out, as I’m using shared hosting at the moment, and I want to reduce page load times as much as I can. It seems to work just fine. The module requires no core patches, and also includes an interface for file exceptions, as TinyMCE (natch) causes the module to fail.