By jpvivere on

Hello,

I have moderate coding/development experience, I most recently come from Joomla development and am interested in obtaining proficiency in Drupal development. I've read a lot of documentation on Drupal development and am currently trying to replicate the functionality I created for my Joomla site in which our company's samples are stored in the main CMS database and presented in the format shown here (a UL of the descriptions/images/etc.).

Based on what I've read, I believe I can implement this without writing a new module. I created a new content type that contains the image, description, and a taxonomy reference so as to categorize the portfolio. Now I need to change the default "blog" style layout that Drupal presents when loading these pages.

I've investigated ways to override the default taxonomy term theme/layout and found several suggestions in the forums (e.g., implement hook_preprocess_page() and identify the arguments to see if there's a taxonomy page being called).

1. My first question is whether or not this a sound approach (or do I need to write a module)?

Secondly, I found a way to override the log-in form theme/layout that requires a call to hook_theme() and then to return an array that contains the root key "user_login". I couldn't find this technique documented anywhere outside of a Drupal.org question/answer forum, so

2. My second question is: Where is the documentation for overriding the default Drupal themes/layouts and is there a list of all the standard hooks in a Drupal 7 installation that I can implement?

Thanks for your help!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

aburrows’s picture

aburrows commented

1. Use views - http://drupal.org/project/views
2. http://api.drupal.org

peterjlord’s picture

peterjlord commented

I'd second the views module. Learning this module inside out is the best way to customise drupal. There are alots of other modules that integrate into it via hooks ie views_slideshow if you want a slideshow.
Other modules that play nice are rules, flag, views bulk operations to name a few.

It' also handy to use in modules instead of writing sql in modules you can build in views and load the view in code

 if($view = views_get_view('viewname')) {
    $view->set_display('default');
    $view->execute_display('default', array($key));
    foreach($view->result as $key => $row) {
       // Do something
    }
  }

Peter J Lord
http://peterjlord.co.uk