Taxonomy Theme, how I love thee
Posted on | February 20, 2007 | 3 Comments
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.
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3 Responses to “Taxonomy Theme, how I love thee”
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December 10th, 2007 @ 3:44 pm
Hey, this module does promise a lot and I’ve installed it, but I’m having trouble finding where the guts of it are in the admin section. Any pointers for someone lost in the woods?
July 23rd, 2008 @ 1:13 pm
Of course not. What we be the fun of helping you get started using it?
yeesssshhh….
April 14th, 2009 @ 8:17 am
Proceed with caution. This module is cool for sure but first thing I found when looking at the code was closing php tags in all the module files. Things get weird when I used the Views settings.
I’m not saying our site wasn’t screwed up to begin with but Taxonomy Theme does add a lot of confusion to a highly-customized site.