Book Image

Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook

By : Karthik Kumar
Book Image

Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook

By: Karthik Kumar

Overview of this book

<p>The greatest strength of Drupal lies in its design which, when employed correctly, allows developers to literally handcraft every aspect of a site, so that it looks and performs exactly how they want it to. While it is reasonably straightforward to download a Drupal theme and install it, doing anything beyond that is not. Using custom themes requires familiarity and experience with Drupal's theming system, especially if you want to easily administer and maintain your themes.</p> <p>Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook provides a plethora of recipes that enable Drupal template designers to make full use of its extensibility and style their site just the way they want it. It is a well-rounded guide which will allow users to take full advantage of Drupal's theming system.</p> <p>This cookbook starts with recipes which address the basics of Drupal's theme system, including 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 content. With the introduction of the Field API and the growing importance of Views and Panels in Drupal 7, chapters have been dedicated to each feature. You will also learn many techniques for dealing with Drupal&rsquo;s templating system, which will allow you create themes which surpass even the existing Drupal and contributed modules.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Displaying the last updated date instead of the submitted date


In this recipe, we will be replacing the contents of the $date template variable which, by default, displays the creation date of the node, with the node's last updated date instead. This is useful with content such as fora, news, and so on where recency is an important indicator of the freshness of a node.

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 the node.tpl.php file is available in its templates folder.

How to do it...

Manipulating the $date variable can be performed using the following steps:

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

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

  3. 3. Look for the myzen_preprocess_node() function; if unavailable, create a skeleton function of the same name.

  4. 4. Edit it so that it effectively functions as in the following snippet. Any pre-existing changes will need to be merged...