Not using Colorbox display from Manage Display page

Thats a correct assumption. I am not doing any node_load's anymore, I am doing menu callbacks. So at first guess, there is no way for me to pass a display type to the callback as the module isn't node specific any longer. I wonder if the display type can be passed in the menu callback?

Is this the right approach? I'm using Features to save the content type settings into their own features and after enabling colorbox_node, all of my features show as overridden because there is this new display type. I wouldn't want to add this module as a dependency to each feature if I'm only using this feature with one of them.

Maybe there could be some checkbox per content type if user wants to enable the display mode, or just instruct users to add a display type called colorbox if they want to have a different display. Then in the code check if that exists, if not, then use the default one. Or something.

Are you asking if the module using menu_callbacks is the correct approach? Do you have a better way? Also you can turn off display types per content types already, you just uncheck it under the manage displays tab.

I won't be able to change the view mode programmatically until this gets resolved #1154382: View mode no longer can be changed. This is postponed until then.

A simple (but not very nice) method is to render the nodes yourself with "colorbox" as view_mode. In colorbox_node.module you could replace the line "$html = drupal_render($page_callback_result);" at line 68 with the following code:

      if (isset($page_callback_result['nodes'])) {
        $html = "";
        foreach ($page_callback_result['nodes'] as $nid => $tmpNode) {
          if (isset($tmpNode['#view_mode'])) {
            $html .= drupal_render(node_view($tmpNode['#node'], 'colorbox'));
          }
        }
      } else {
        $html = drupal_render($page_callback_result);
      }

The bad with this code is, that the node_view-function is called twice. First in "menu_execute_active_handler" with view_mode full and second in the above customized code with view_mode colorbox.

Great work! I don't think its that expensive as the node will already be cached.
Hmm, what happens if you have the colorbox display turned off for the specific content type?

If a display-mode is deactivated or simply not available (e.g. if you use a wrong name for the display-mode) the system seems to use the default mode.

In our example, if a user deactivates the custom display settings for the colorbox-mode, the node_view-function call uses the full-mode independent from the given value "colorbox".

How about supplying a patch against the latest DEV?

Updated the code by sludwig to the latest DEV. Will go back and fix this correctly when core is fixed.