Drupal 6 - Passing variable between functions specifically - Passing menu name to phptemplate_menu_item

Question

I'm quite new to Drupal 6 and theming it. My theme required the main menu to pump out quite extensive html/css for my reasonably involved styling. To achieve this I pieced together this code 'function phptemplate_menu_item' (see bottom) which sits in my template.php and produces different html depending on the whether the menu item has children or not and uses the contents of the link to generate a css class.

My problem is that this code is also being applied to my other menus. I would like make the menu_item generate different html depending on whether it is in the primary-menu or not. I would have thought that the easiest way to do this is with an if statement in the function phptemplate_menu_item, for example:

function phptemplate_menu_item (...){
  if ($menu_name == 'primary-links')
  {DO ABC}
  else
  {DO XYZ}
}

However I believe I need to know how to pass the menu name to the phptemplate_menu_item function. Any help with this would be really appreciated as I have been banging my head against the wall trying to solve this for some time now.

Thanks!

function phptemplate_menu_item($link, $has_children, $menu = '', $in_active_trail = FALSE, $extra_class = NULL) {

$class = ($menu ? 'no_wrap' : ($has_children ? 'collapsed' : 'li_wrap'));
if (!empty($extra_class)) {
  $class .= ' '. $extra_class;
}
if ($in_active_trail) {
  $class .= ' active-trail';
}
if (!empty($link)) {
/* The following section gives the list items unique classes based on their link text - note how spaces and sepcial chars are removed */
// remove all HTML tags and make everything lowercase
$css_id = strtolower(strip_tags($link));
// remove colons and anything past colons
if (strpos($css_id, ':')) $css_id = substr ($css_id, 0, strpos($css_id, ':'));
// Preserve alphanumerics, everything else goes away
$pattern = '/[^a-z]+/ ';
$css_id = preg_replace($pattern, '', $css_id);
$class .= ' '. $css_id;
}
// the following code returns the menu item formatted in a different fashion depending on the class of the item. The first one is for items with a class of none - ie the space li at end of menu
if (strstr($class, 'none')) {
      return '<li class="'. $class . ' main"></span></span></li>';
}
if (strstr($class, 'li_wrap')) {
      return '<li class="'. $class .' main"><span class="wrapped">'. $link . $menu ."<span class='indicator'></span></li>\n";
}
if (strstr($class, 'no_wrap')) {
      return '<li class="'. $class . ' main">'. $link ."<span class='indicator'></span><span class='menu_box'><span class='menu_box_inner'>". $menu ."</span></span></li>\n";
}

}

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 05 '11 at 11:19

Well I think the solution found here it's the best so I'm not going to take credit for it. Instead of overwriting theme_menu_item you should define your custom function theme_primary_links starting from theme_links.You can choose whatever name you think it's best for your custom theme (but make sure that it's not already used).

Bottom line: sometimes it's easier to define your custom theme than overwriting the default ones. That way you know that you can strictly apply the custom theme according to your needs (e.g. applied only to the primary menu links). Overwriting is best used when you want your changes to be global (e.g. applied to all menu links).

Thanks Max that sounds good. I'll bear in mind to try to 'define my custom theme than overwriting the default ones'. I ran out of time so I ended up bludgeoning the outputted html to suit both menus. Your approach will be much cleaner, so I'll give it a go soon. Cheers — Paul Trotter, Dec 06 '11 at 10:40

Drupal 6 - Passing variable between functions specifically - Passing menu name to phptemplate_menu_item

1 Answers1