Coder’s Eye

I’m building a new Drupal 5 site for a client, and I was dreading the hack-work I was going to have to do to make it look like what the designer had come up with. There are at least five distinct page templates in the crazy thing!

I love working with a designer, since then I don’t have to make all the choices, but sometimes it can lead to tons of work. It certainly has in this case. Most Drupal sites have just one template for a reason, but this one needed several, and they also needed to be maintainable and assignable after I was gone from the picture.

So, I started trying to figure out how I would handle such a beast. I decided to use Drupal’s Taxonomies to handle template selection. I made a Vocabulary named “Template”, and then added five terms to it: home, hometab, information, landingpage, and secondlevel.

Still, how to get Drupal to switch in the right page template at the right time? Then I found it, the perfect module for my needs, Taxonomy Theme. It let me assign templates to taxonomy terms, just like I was planning.

That was perfect, but what made it even more perfect was the synergy with Drupal’s concept of sub-themes. I simply made one master theme, with five subthemes. I overrode only the unique parts on each, and let the master CSS and page template handle the rest. It was a massive win for this project.

I’m still working on this project, with alpha delivery due in a couple weeks. However, what I had estimated to be 40 hours of custom programming turned out to be only a day of careful taxonomy creation and sub-theme organizing. Thank you, Thilo Wawrzik and John VanDyk, authors of this excellent module.