Tag: Drupal

Applying Drupal Patches in Composer

I recently had a Drupal core patch that I needed to use on a site I’m building. This can be done manually using the patch command, but when managing a Drupal project with Composer, any manual patches could get wiped out on the next run of the composer update or composer install commands. In order to make sure patches stick, they need to be added to Composer, like a requirement.

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Accessing Drupal Site Name and Menus in Templates

When I am creating a custom Drupal site, I like to hard code a few things into the templates, such as the site name and menus. This prevents the client from doing something like accidentally moving the menu blocks into a different region, and it also gives me more control over the HTML markup.

In Drupal 7, there are two ways that I have found to access this system data within the templates. I am going to walk through an example of each method in which I will add the following elements to my page.tpl.php template file:

  • My site name
  • The main menu
  • A custom menu named “Secondary menu” (which has a machine name of “menu-secondary-menu”)

Method 1

The first method involves setting up some variables in the template.php file and then accessing those variables in the page.tpl.php file.

In the template.php file:

function newhopeks_preprocess_page(&$variables) {
    $variables['site_name'] = filter_xss_admin(variable_get('site_name', 'Default Site Name'));
    $variables['main_menu'] = menu_main_menu();
    $variables['secondary_menu'] = menu_navigation_links('menu-secondary-menu');
}

In the page.tpl.php file:

<h1><?php print $site_name; ?></h1>
<?php
    print theme('links__system_main_menu', array('links' => $main_menu));
    print theme('links__menu_secondary_menu', array('links' => $secondary_menu));
?>

Method 2

The second method bypasses the template.php file and accesses the data directly.

In the page.tpl.php file:

<h1><?php print filter_xss_admin(variable_get('site_name', 'Default Site Name')); ?></h1>
<?php
    print theme('links__system_main_menu', array('links' => menu_main_menu()));
    print theme('links__menu_secondary_menu', array('links' => menu_navigation_links('menu-secondary-menu')));
?>

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