Three tips for comment theming in Drupal

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Today I’m just demonstrating a few simple theme adjustments to comments. Comments in Drupal 5 are “not sexy”, out of the box, so in this short post I’m going to illustrate how to:

change the text on “submitted” lines in comments (just a little)
add nofollow to username links – unless you’re feeling generous
remove the “not verified” marker from anonymous users

<?php // change the "submitted by" text to "posted by" // note that you can alter the date display too, by changing the way // format_date() is called - see http://api.drupal.org/api/function/format_date/5 $vars['submitted'] = t('Posted by !a on @b.', array('!a' => theme('username', $vars['comment']), '@b' => format_date($vars['comment']->timestamp))); ?>

This first snippet belongs in the ‘comment’ section of your _phptemplate_variables function in template.php; I have an example of this here.

Moving on to that “not verified” business, and the question of holding on to your link juice, adding an overridden theme_username() function is the way to go. Here’s some code, which you can also place in your template.php file in your theme. Remember, if you don’t have that file in your theme, you can just create it yourself. I personally recommend Zen as a starting point for theming.

<?php
// we can't use phptemplate_username as this is already declared in that engine
function mytheme_username($object) { // rename according to your theme  // this basically means "if the user has an account"
  if ($object->uid && $object->name) {
    // Shorten the name when it is too long or it will break many tables.
    if (drupal_strlen($object->name) > 20) {  // obviously you could change this value
      $name = drupal_substr($object->name, 0, 15) .'...';
    }
    else {
      $name = $object->name;
    }    if (user_access('access user prosites/default/files')) {
      // we could nofollow the internal links too (authenticated user's pages)
      // but there's not really any point - my site doesn't use membership,
      // so usernames are not highlighted -
      // commented line below would do that, though.
      // $output = l($name, 'user/'. $object->uid,
      //     array('title' => t('View user profile.'), 'rel' => 'nofollow'));
      $output = l($name, 'user/'. $object->uid,
          array('title' => t('View user profile.')));
    }
    else {
      $output = check_plain($name);
    }
  } // if we're entering this func, the user is anon (i.e. we want to nofollow them)
  else if ($object->name) {
    if ($object->homepage) {
      // this is where we're nofollow-ing the external links to comment authors' pages
      // we don't really need to use t() here, as rel=nofollow is language independent
      $output = l($object->name, $object->homepage, array('rel' => 'nofollow'));
    }
    else {
      $output = check_plain($object->name);
    }
    // commenting out this line prevents "teh ugly" in the $submitted text
    // $output .= ' ('. t('not verified') .')';
  }
  else {
    $output = variable_get('anonymous', t('Anonymous'));
  }
  return $output;
}
?>

If you’ve got any other simple tips like these, let me know, so I can use & share those too!

Update: This code works fine under Drupal 6 as well – but don’t forget to clear your theme registry when you’ve modified things in your theme!

Author:

Nik

RSS Tags:

Drupal

PHP

planet

SEO

themes

Original Post:

http://www.kinetasystems.com/blog/three-tips-for-comment-theming-in-drupal

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