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I have a snippet of HTML that I've saved in my theme as mysnippet.inc. I'm using this code in template files (eg. node.tpl.php) to include it:

<?php include($directory."/includes/mysnippet.inc"); ?>

This is working fine, but the snippet also needs to access Drupal variable $node_url. So I tried to global it into my snippet:

<?php global $node_url ; ?>
<?php print $node_url; ?>

This doesn't work.

What would be the best way to achieve this? Should I be using template.php to create a variable containing my code snippet instead?

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2 Answers

up vote 0 down vote accepted

The best way to achieve this is to:

1. Create a custom theme function using hook_theme().

2. Implement a preprocessor in your template.php (you can also do it in a custom module). Here's a D.O. document describing how to do it. Assuming you want to preprocess the node.tpl.php template, a preprocessor that would be run regardless of what theme you are using would be called phptemplate_preprocess_node.

3. Inside your preprocessor, call the custom theme() function you created in step #1. Add the results of your theme function to the $variables array that are passed to your preprocessor. For example:

<?php
// In your template.php...
function phptemplate_preprocess_node($variables) {
  $variables['foo_bar'] = theme('my_theming_func', $params);
}

4. Now on node.tpl.php all you have to do is:

<?php
if(isset($foo_bar)):
  print $foo_bar;
endif;

I know that this sounds more difficult than what you where trying to do, however using PHP globals in Drupal and include_once in templates is highly discouraged.

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Thanks for the detailed, clear answer. Am I right that step 1 (create custom theme function) would be done with a custom module? – pushka Dec 14 '11 at 8:11
@pushka Yes. You implement hook_theme() in your custom module. You substitute the word hook for the name of your module. So if your module is called pushka, your hook_theme() implementation would be written like function pushka_theme() { ... } – amateur barista Dec 14 '11 at 15:54
up vote 0 down vote

You can access the $variables array in your included file like this:

 // assuming you are viewing a node
 $node = $variables['node'];
 // the node is an object, so to display the url do
 echo drupal_get_path_alias('node/'.$node->nid);

To see what kind of data the $variables array contains do something like:

 echo '<pre>';
 print_r($variables);
 echo '</pre>';
share|improve this answer
This certainly works - thanks! – pushka Dec 14 '11 at 8:11

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