Quick theme tip: abusing Drupal's $mission variable

Just a quick tip for an extra, more accessible theming variable. I have personally found that on nearly all the sites I’ve built, I’ve never had a use for the Mission variable. So it struck me that I could probably use this field to output something else; something relevant to the general workings of the site, for sure though.

So, on this site, I have edited the mission variable and put in the copyright notice that you see at the bottom of the page. I saved the config screen and carried on, thinking that it would just be working – I had tested it out on the front page, and the value was appearing where I had placed the $mission variable in the footer area in my page template. No problems, I thought.

Today, I actually noticed that this was not appearing, and I couldn’t work it out for a while, but I trawled through the phptemplate.engine, and in there is some code that conditionally sets the $mission variable on only the front page – perhaps that’s why it doesn’t get used so much?

Anyway, I opened up the template.php file for my theme, and placed in it the code below, in the _phptemplate_variables bit under case 'page' – see here. Now I have a usable variable across all pages of my site, with the added advantage that this is accessible from the admin interface at “site information”. I guess that the theme settings API in Drupal 6 may alleviate this problem, but for simple things like updating the year (which is contained in my © statement) in D5, this is a potential time saver (and face-saver) for administrators.