Customize the search results page

Do you need to change the content shown in the results of the Drupal search? It is imperative to do this in the Drupal way, and it is most helpful to understand the thought process of doing such a procedure. Following is an example of how to customize the Drupal search results from more than just a technical aspect but also from the thought process required. This same thinking can be done when having to customize other components within Drupal framework.

The first step is to find out what is driving the Drupal search. In the modules directory you will see the search folder which is a pretty good indication that this is what drives the Drupal search. Now, open the search module folder to see what is inside and what will be there to customize, keeping in mind that you will not actually be doing any changes to any files in the search module itself.

Inside the search module you will find the standard .info, .install, .module and a .css file. In this case you will be looking at the search.module itself. What you are looking for is something you can hook into or theme. The functions you are looking for are theme_ functions and in the search module you will find theme_search_theme_form, theme_search_block_form, theme_search_item and theme_search_page. You will be able to customize any one of these functions in a way that will not touch the actual Drupal core module. Great!

In this example you are going to change the look of the search result page (or srp to all those seo gurus). We are going to remove the line of info that tells who wrote the node, when it was written, comments etc... From first glance it may be a good assumption that the theme_search_page function is the one to customize from within my own theme. For this example we will use the zen theme that would be located in your /sites/all/themes/zen folder. Here is the theme_search_page which is nicely commented so you can see the parameters, and purpose of this function.

After looking more closely you will notice that this function calls the theme_search_items function by way of theme('search_item', $entry, $type) so you now see that this is actually the function that you want to manipulate. This function looks like the following:

So what you will do next is to copy all of the above function directly into my template.php file that is found in the /sites/all/themes/zen folder. The template.php file is what you can use in order to indirectly manipulate core Drupal. Not just for search, but for all core modules. Then change the name of the theme_search_item($item, $type) function to zen_search_item($item, $type). After saving the file, Drupal no longer calls search modules function but now calls your newly created theme zen_search_item function. Simply awsome, and now when you have to do a core drupal update, your changes in the theme will not be over written when a core search module update is performed.

Don't forget to change the name of your template.php function or you may get the following error. "Fatal error: Cannot redeclare theme_search_item() (previously declared in....)" I just saying ... this didn't happen to me ;)

Now, lets get to the really good stuff. Because this new zen_search_item() function is in your theme, you are pretty free to do whatever you need in order to get the results you desire. So, my quick change of removing the extra info mentioned previously can be accomplished by removing the code that contains the extra data that you don't need. Your new function in your template.php file now becomes:

So, you can see that you removed a lot of info but at this point you can go both ways. You can add content, change the elements or do whatever you desire, without editing core Drupal!