Monday, November 7, 2011

Views and jCarousel fun

Node.tpl.php
So, to make a long story short, I got a client who wanted to display his Drupal site's content nodes just like the image above. We are working with Drupal 6.

He wanted:
  1. A callout box that contains location and a link
  2. An image carousel 
  3. A social networking toolbox 
Interesting. 

So we start off with a custom content type. My setup is composed of CCK, Location, Image, ImageCache. 

Content Construction Kit (CCK) needs no explaination. You can't make custom content type without it. The Location module is used with CCK to capture Location data. The Image module so we can attached, well, images to the node. The ImageCache complements this; allowing us to process the attached images to whatever size we need it.

We are are off to writing code in the our theme's template.php. We are going to preprocess our node data. Here is mine. Your CCK field names might not be same as mine but you can look at the CCK field names up with a dpm($vars) call. Remember that you can't make a dpm call without the devel module.

function [YOUR_THEME]_preprocess_node(&$vars, $hook) {      
    // construct callout box for organizer and venue
    $organizer_url = $vars['field_organizer_link']['0']['view'];  
    $venue_name = $vars['field_record_venue']['0']['name'];  
    $venue_street = $vars['field_record_venue']['0']['street'];  
    $venue_city = $vars['field_record_venue']['0']['city'];  

    $field_venue = '<div class="venue"><span class="venue-title">' . $venue_name . '</span><br/> <span class="venue-location">' . $venue_street . ', ' . $venue_city . '</span></div>';  
    $field_organizer = '<span class="organizer"><p> For more Information,<br/> visit the organizer\'s site</p>' . $organizer_url . '</span>';  
    $vars['callout'] = '<div class="callout">' . $field_venue . $field_organizer . '</div>';  

    // construct embedded view for image carousel  
    $embedded_view = 'embedded_related_img';  
    $embedded_args = $vars[nid];  
    $emdedded_view_display = 'default';  
    $vars['embedded_carousel'] = views_embed_view($embedded_view, $emdedded_view_display, $embedded_args);  
  }  
We then can insert the newly constructed callout box via the $callout variable. See line #12.

The next step here is the image carousel. I did this using Views and jCarousel. When you read up on how to use jCarousel it should be apparent that you can use a Views argument to make an image carousel of the current node using its id and get all the attached images. I then named the view "embedded_related_img". Set the view style to jCarousel. The options shouldn't be a problem. It will not preview correctly since Views will not load the javascript for the carousel. I then attached this on the node via the $embedded_carousel variable. The magic is the views_embed_view() function. See lines #15 - 18.

And as for the social networking bar that's done with the addThis module. This should be a no-brainer.

For reference, here is the node.tpl.php file.

<div id="record-<?php print $node->nid; ?>" class="node record clear-block">   
   <?php if ($page == 0): ?>  
     <h2 class="title"><a href="<?php print $node_url ?>" title="<?php print $title ?>"><?php print $title ?></a></h2>  
   <?php else: ?>  
     <h2 class="title"><?php print $title ?></h2>  
   <?php endif; ?>  
   <div class="content clear-block">  
     <?php print $picture ?>  
     <?php if(!$teaser): ?>  
       <?php print $callout; ?>  
     <?php endif; ?>  
     <?php print $content ?>  
   </div>  
   <?php if(!$teaser): ?>  
     <div class="embeded_view clear-block">  
       <?php print $embedded_carousel; ?>  
     </div>    
   <?php endif; ?>  
   <?php  
   if ($links) {  
     print '<div class="node-links">'. $links .'</div>';  
   }  
   ?>  
 </div>

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