BrianDart.net blog

I needed to add a new field, loca­tion, to the user pro­file on a Dru­pal site, and the value set in the loca­tion field needed to be dis­played when the user made a com­ment on the site — like “Brian Dart | Seat­tle, WA”.

I found two great arti­cles online that helped guide me to a solution:

Dru­pal: use user pro­file field in comment

Pro­file: extend­ing user account information

These arti­cles walked me through the steps of con­fig­ur­ing the pro­file mod­ule in Dru­pal and then helped me under­stand how I could access the value from the code.  Unfor­tu­nately, I could not get the code to work prop­erly using the phptemplate_comment_submitted func­tion.  There was already a phptemplate_preprocess_comment func­tion in the template.php file, so I added the fol­low­ing code — slightly mod­i­fied due to the dif­fer­ence in vari­ables that were available.

function phptemplate_preprocess_comment(&$variables) {
  $user = user_load(array('uid' => $variables['comment']->uid));
  profile_load_profile($user);
  $location = $user->profile_location;
  $comment = $variables['comment'];
  if ( !module_exists('profile') || !$location) {
    $variables['author'] = theme('username', $comment);
  } else {
    $variables['author'] = theme('username', $comment) . ' | ' . $location;
  }
}

The loca­tion field I set up was called ‘profile_location’, and I am sim­ply adding that on to the author vari­able, which is already being dis­played on the com­ment.  Not the most ele­gant solu­tion, I am sure, but it served my pur­poses well.

Look­ing for a way to con­trol your Dru­pal theme’s form out­put?  I needed a way to con­trol how the forms, more specif­i­cally the user forms (log in, reg­is­ter, etc.), were out­putting onto the page.

This arti­cle helped me through the steps I needed to cre­ate tem­plates for the forms and then style them accord­ingly.  And, despite the article’s title, the same can be accom­plished for any form in the Dru­pal sys­tem (edit: with the excep­tion of Uber­cart, but that isn’t Dru­pal core…). Great stuff.

Them­ing the reg­is­ter form in Dru­pal 6