Drupal 7 | Brad Erickson

Render/embed a Panels Page in a jQuery Dialog Box

Monday, May 16th, 2011

I need a page on my Drupal 7 project site to display within a jQuery modal dialog box. Adding content to a jQuery dialog is straightforward with the Dialog module. The issue was the dialog box needed to contain the contents of a Panel. Previously I've embeded Views using views_embed_view(), but I've never tried to embed a Panel. A web search wouldn't give me a quick answer, so I worked it out.

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Change Image Style and Row Class depending on result count

Monday, Apr 18th, 2011

This is a simple example of the use of Views hooks in the template.php file of a theme. It is written for use with Drupal 7 and Views 7.x-3.0-beta3.

In this project, a page contains a View which must display one, two or three results/rows. Each row contains an image and and body text. The final output display must to stay roughly the same size regardless of the amount of content. To make it all fit and allow for custom theming/CSS, I decided to change the Image Style and Row Class depending on the number of results.

Adding an error class to a Form API element parent/wrapper

Monday, Apr 18th, 2011

Much of the styling and theming a designer specifies in a Drupal design mockup can be easily implemented. Once in a while, you'll run into a request that seems simple, but gets far more involved.

Creating a Panels Pane Content Type instead of a Block

Friday, Apr 15th, 2011

In this project, I'm using both Drupal Blocks and Panels Panes. Blocks are used in the overall site layout/theme. Panes are used within the content area. Currently, there are five custom Panels layouts, and 15 custom Pages. Panels has made the content area customization significantly more straightforward.

Embedding the Drupal 7 search form in another site with jQuery

Friday, Mar 25th, 2011

A section of my current project will be hosted by an external server/service. I hand them a HTML file, and they build their content within it. One problem is that the header search form must still work. For security reasons, Drupal won't accept a Form Post without the correct Form ID, so we need Drupal to generate the form.

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Clear a form field on click with JS & Behaviors in Drupal 7

Thursday, Mar 17th, 2011

A common web design feature is to move the label for a form field into the field value, then clear the field once it gains focus. There are many ways to implement this functionality, but this is the Drupal 7 theming method.

These steps assume your theme contains no custom Javascript. They describe how to add the word Search to the regular Drupal search block text field.

Open your template.php file.
We will use hook_form_alter() to change the value of the search field:

Creating an image caption with a Field API formatter

Wednesday, Mar 9th, 2011

Update 10/24/11: This article is the most popular article on my site. To simplify everything, I've implemented this as Image Caption Formatter on drupal.org.