Drupal Templating Tricks

So I’ve been working on our Intranet redesign with Drupal and one issue we have is we want people to be able to post PDFs to the Intranet. The simplest way to handle this in Drupal is to create a content type for PDF and use the CCK file field to give people the ability to upload files. This way the PDFs sit by themselves and won’t have to be attached to a particular page (which is what happens if you use the default Drupal upload module). Also the upload module makes it so that any node can have files attached which I didn’t want.

The issue with doing it this way is that when you click on a PDF node you end up at a page that has the Title and a link to the PDF you uploaded. This isn’t what we wanted. Instead we wanted the link to take us to the PDF proper. To do this one has to make a template for that content type. Normally when you want to alter the template for a content type you create a new node template. But this only allows you to alter the content portion of the screen (ie. the portion where the node displays usually the center of the screen). If you want to change something more than this you need to alter both the page and node template along with adding some new info to your template.php file. The basic steps are as follows:

1. Alter template.php to add code for your new template. It will be something like the following
   function my_theme_preprocess_page(&$variables) {
   if ($variables['node']->type == ‘my_content_type’ && arg(2)!=’edit’ && arg(1) !=’add’) {
   $variables['template_files'][] = ‘page-node-my_content_type’;
   }
   }
2. Create a page-your_content_type.tpl.php file
   Put into this file changes to the sections of the page other than the main content area
3. Create a node-your_content_type.tpl.php file
   Put changes here to how you want the content to display. The default node.tpl.php just drops in all the content but you can selectively show certain fields and govern how you want those fields to be displayed.
4. Clear your cache
   Site Configuration | Performance

The key part of this whole process was discovering the drupal_goto function which basically is a way to do a redirect within Drupal. The advantage over a traditional PHP redirect is that you can go to a full url or an internal Drupal url like node/4. So my node-pdf.tpl.php file has the following in it

drupal_goto($field_pdf[0]['filepath']);

Now my PDFs nodes all redirect to the actual PDF if you are viewing the node. If you edit the node then you get the normal edit form.

Some key Drupal documentation that really helped me with this

• Core templates and Suggestions – really important to get to information about which variable are available to use in which template files
• Working with Template Suggestions – Read both the page and the comments which have good information