Book Image

Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook

Book Image

Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook

Overview of this book

Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a website to fit your needs. The greatest strength of Drupal lies in its design, which, when done right, allows developers to customize every aspect of the site. Although it might sound easy to customize the look of your site, it's not a cakewalk to build custom themes that are easy to administer and maintain.Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook provides a plethora of recipes that enable Drupal template designers to make full use of Drupal's extensibility and style their site just the way they want it. It is a well-rounded guide, which will allow users looking to theme their Drupal sites to do so by taking full advantage of Drupal's theming system. It covers numerous aspects from creating custom themes to using the powerful CCK, Views, and Panels modules to create rich designs that are easy to administer and maintain.Structured as a collection of recipes to perform a wide variety of tasks, this book will guide readers through most important aspects of Drupal theming. It starts off with recipes dealing with the basics of Drupal's theme system: you will find recipes for solving all your problems with regions and blocks. It then moves on to advanced topics such as creating a custom theme and using it to modify the layout and style of the content that is output on a page. A substantial number of recipes are dedicated to Drupal's template system, which will provide you with a solid foundation in order to override the output of Drupal and contributed modules. Furthermore, as the combination of modules such as CCK, Views, and Panels is so widely prevalent, chapters have been dedicated for each of these modules. With this book, you'll learn to get the most out of Drupal's templating system and its modules to create rich designs for your site.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Displaying the date field in calendar form


This recipe will use a number of techniques to transform a standard text-based date field into an eye-catching calendar form.

Getting ready

We will be using the myzen theme created earlier in this book as the example theme in this recipe. It is also assumed that a node.tpl.php file exists in myzen's templates folder.

How to do it...

We are going to break down this operation into three stages. The first is the preprocess stage where we break the node's timestamp down into the required component parts and introduce them as variables in a preprocess() function.

  1. Navigate to the myzen theme folder at sites/all/themes/myzen.

  2. Open the file template.php in an editor.

  3. Locate the myzen_preprocess_node() function, or if unavailable, create one.

  4. Add the following code into the aforementioned preprocess function so that it effectively looks like the following:

    function myzen_preprocess_node(&$vars) {
    $vars['calendar_month'] = format_date($vars['node']->created...