Fun Theming All Node Edit Forms at Once

Drupal 6 provides many avenues to modify its appearance, including ways to theme a form. Recently I themed all node edit forms at once. I will share here how I did it.

The usual route to theme a node edit form, or any form for that matter, is to grab the form ID, which is used as a theme hook, and implement a hook_theme function in template.php in the theme.

function MYTHEME_theme() { return array(
    'blog_node_form' => array(
      'arguments' => array('form' => NULL),
      'template' => 'blog-node-form',
    )
  );
}
?>

This lets you alter the theme registry to add a template file for a specific form. There are many blog posts that go into more detail than I do here on how to theme forms in general.

The above is useful if I want to theme a blog content type or the user registration form, for example. Most sites have at least a few different content types. I wanted to make alterations to all node forms at once and use a single template file. This involved a slightly different approach.

Correction: This next step with the theme_registry_alter example is not necessary. See comments below this post.

There is a theme_node_form theme function in Drupal, which is called by all node forms. I wanted to replace or supersede this theme function with a template. I tried to do this with hook_theme, but it continued to pick up some parts of theme_node_form in addition to supporting my template file. So it called the form array twice, causing recursion; which is not what I expected. So instead I took a colleague's suggestion and altered the theme registry via hook_theme_registry_alter(). This seemed clean and simple enough.

This takes the node_form theme hook and changes it from a theme function to a template, in sites/all/themes/MYTHEME/template.php:

function MYTHEME_theme_registry_alter(&$theme_registry) {
  $theme_registry['node_form'] = array(
    'template' => 'node-form',
    'arguments' => array('form' => NULL)
  );
}
?>

This worked great. But I hear that hook_theme_registry_alter is intended for use in modules only? If you know why, please chime in with a comment. Or leave a comment on the theme registry for special cases handbook page.

And the fun part... Spiffing up the node edit form

Here is what I did. This creates two columns for the form and places all top level form fieldsets on the right.

Screenshot:

Screenshot of modified node edit form.

And here is how I did it...

Photo
Squiggy

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Photo
Josh

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Josh

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Photo
Stephanie