Drupal 7: How do I extract specific field in a taxonomy page

Question

How do I extract specific field for display in a taxonomy page?

I have a custom content type called "film" and each film has a Term Reference field called "casting". As expected I can click on a "casting" (tag) it brings me a page where all films are listed wherever this tag is associated. For expample if I click on "Kate Winslet" from movie Titanic, I land on a page http://localhost/mysite/tags/kate-winslet where other movies of Kate Winslet are listed. Up to this point everything is just fine.

I do not want Drupal to pull in and show default fields like just Title and Body in its own display format. Rather I want it so that I can display a photo from each film, year of release and of course the title and trimmed version of the body. I only want to customize the content of this page so that I have the control over What to Show and Where To Show a specific field value.

This is what I tried:

I cloned and put page.tpl.php in my theme's template folder. Renamed it as page--vocabulary--tags.tpl.php. Then I took out the following line of code (<?php print render($page['content']);?>) from my page--vocabulary--tags.tpl.php. The intention was to check whether the overridden template is actually being accessed by Drupal or not. It does!

But I am not been able to extract fields like field_photo or field_release_date from $page['content]. To get an idea about defined variables and how they are placed I used the following line of code: <pre><?php /*print var_export(get_defined_vars(), TRUE);*/ ?></pre>. But even from there I could not extract a particular field like I mentioned above. The fields look to be somewhere inside $page['content']['system_main']['nodes'], but I don't know how to get to a specific field directly.

I also created a template.php with the following preprocess hook function:

<?php
function introduction_preprocess_page(&$vars) {
  if (arg(0) == 'taxonomy' && arg(1) == 'term' && is_numeric(arg(2))) {
    $term = taxonomy_term_load(arg(2));
    $vars['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'page__vocabulary__' . $term->vocabulary_machine_name;
    $vars['content'] = $vars['page']['content']['system_main']['nodes'];
  }
}
?>

Both <?php print render($content) ?> and <?php print render($page['content']) ?> print the same result but I want something like <?php render($content['photo_field'])?> which I am not been able to.

I am sorry for making this too long. I have just stepped into Drupal. So wanted to make sure that what I am trying to explain matches exactly what I want to accomplish.

Answer 1

You are probably trying the long way to this. You can use Views module. It allows to create custom listings querying the database, but also override existent ones, like the case of the taxonomy term page listing.

Once you have the module installed (if it's not yet), particularly the Views UI module, go to /admin/structure/views and scroll to bottom, where disabled views (grayed rows) are. You'll find one called Taxonomy term, described as 'A view to emulate Drupal core's handling of taxonomy/term.'

Click Enable on the right of it and then go to the same place where the Enable link is, click the arrow to unfold and choose Edit. Once you're in the view edit page, you can manipulate the listing at your convenience, adding/removing fields or whatever you want to do in your particular case. If you are not familiar with Views, I recommend you to learn about it, there is a lot of related content on the web and it is close to essential for Drupal development.

Also, if you want to add more customisation to the page, you can use the same approach with the Panels module, who allows to override system pages (not just listings like Views).