Easy Node Customization

Drupal has an awesome customization feature that not too many new people seem to know about. You can customize just about any view by creating a special template file for that view.

For Example:

Let's say that you want to update the front page layout. What you need to do is create a custom template file for the front page. Drupal themes have template files for each node type. If you look in your theme directory you should see files like node.tpl.php and page.tpl.php. These files describe the layout for nodes (like blog posts) and pages respectively.

Open the page.tpl.php file. Then save the file as page-front.tpl.php. Congratulations, you have just created a custom theme file for the front page of your site. When you edit the contents of that file and upload it to your theme directory the layout in that file will apply only to the front page of your site.

If you want to create a custom theme file for only blog posts you would take the same steps as described above but with node.tpl.php. You would change the name of the theme file to node-blog.tpl.php. This will work for any custom node type you create using CCK. Just replace the word 'blog' with the name of the new content type you have created.

At this point you might be asking, "What types of changes can I make to these files?" Good question. Editing the tpl.php files makes sense when you are looking to add features not already implemented by a module. For example, I've used this technique to add the AddThis bookmarking widget to only blog nodes.

You can also use this technique to change the layout or remove certain elements of a node. For example, you can add, remove or move the links to categories or 'submitted by' information. In order to get more familiar with how you can use this technique I recommend that you work with a test site, make some changes to the custom theme files and see how that affects the look of your nodes once you've uploaded the changes.