Using Drupal's template.php for Overrides

If we go to a node that has submitted information showing and do the same Drupal Themer Information trick that we did back when we moved the $breadcrumb[/inlinecode] variable, we can find out what the parent template for that “Submitted by…” line is. You will see that its parent is the node.tpl.php file. If you open up that file we can see that the $submitted[/inlinecode] variable is being printed there to produce that output as highlighted below:

<?php if ($page == 0) { ?><h2 class="title"><a href=

"<?php print $node_url?>"><?php print $title?></a></h2><?php }; ?>

<div class="content"><?php print $content?></div>

<span class="strong"><strong><span class="submitted"><?php print $submitted?></span></strong></span>

<div class="taxonomy"><?php print $terms?></div>

To change this, we can override it in our template.php file. But Newmarine doesn’t have a template.php file yet. So let’s create one and put it in our newmarine folder, along with our other theme files.

Once we have the template.php file created, we need to add a new preprocess[/inlinecode] function to intercept the variable we wish to change. Add the following code to your template.php file:

<?php

// $Id:$



/**

 * Implementation of hook_preprocess_node().

 */

function newmarine_preprocess_node(&amp;$vars) {

 

}

Now we need to actually override the variable, by adding it inside the function and then putting our own value into it:

<?php

// $Id:$



/**

 * Implementation of hook_preprocess_node().

 */

function newmarine_preprocess_node(&amp;$vars) {

<span class="strong"><strong> // Change the submitted value to output like "Posted on June 12, 2008".</strong></span>

<span class="emphasis"><em> $vars['submitted'] = t('Posted on ') .</em></span>

<span class="emphasis"><em> format_date($vars['node']->created, 'custom', 'F j, Y');</em></span>

}

Once again, clear the good old cache at Administer→Site configuration→Performance (admin/settings/performance).

When you reload the page, you should see our new format for the submitted date.

Turn on the Themer info by checking the box. Now you can hover over the breadcrumb and then click to display the info in the Drupal Themer Information box.

Now we know which function is creating the breadcrumbs, so we can go grab a copy of it to work with. Open up includes/theme.inc and search for theme_breadcrumb[/inlinecode]. Copy the entire theme_breadcrumb[/inlinecode] function. The function basically just takes an array of HTML links and uses PHP’s implode()[/inlinecode] function to concatenate the values using the »[/inlinecode] character, wrapping this in a

Open your template.php file, and paste the function in. Rename it to newmarine_breadcrumb[/inlinecode], as shown:

/**

 * Return a themed breadcrumb trail.

 *

 * @param $breadcrumb

 * An array containing the breadcrumb links.

 * @return a string containing the breadcrumb output.

 */

<span class="strong"><strong>function newmarine_breadcrumb($breadcrumb) {</strong></span>

 if (!empty($breadcrumb)) {

	return '<div class="breadcrumb">'. implode(' &#187; ', $breadcrumb) .'</div>';

 }

}

Now we just need to change the » to a double colon (::), as shown here:

function newmarine_breadcrumb($breadcrumb) {

 if (!empty($breadcrumb)) {

	<span class="strong"><strong>return '<div class="breadcrumb">'. implode(' :: ', $breadcrumb) .'</div>';</strong></span>

 }

}

Clear the cache and refresh the screen. Our breadcrumbs now look just the way we want them to.