Drupal Forum Topic List Customization

For a new project I have been working on, I wanted to alter the default Drupal forum topic list, so that instead of displaying the following columns:

TOPIC - REPLIES - CREATED - LAST REPLY

I wanted it to simply display:

TOPIC - REPLIES

I soon found out that I would need to customize Drupal forum at the theme level, by creating a forum_topic_list.tpl.php file in my theme directory, and adding a snippet of code to template.php, which was also in my theme directory.

For those wondering how to do this, here goes.

Drupal 5.x and Forum Customization

Step 1

Add the following PHP snippet to your template.php theme file.

/**
* This snippet tells Drupal to override the forum_topic_list function
* and load a custom forum_topic_list.tpl.php layout file
* in the theme folder
*/
function phptemplate_forum_topic_list($tid, $topics, $sortby, $forum_per_page) {
return _phptemplate_callback('forum_topic_list', array('tid' => $tid, 'topics' =>$topics, 'sortby' =>$sortby, 'forum_per_page' =>$forum_per_page));
}

Step 2

Create a forum_topic_list.tpl.php file in your theme directory, which contains the following PHP code (don't forget to add an opening PHP tag:

/**
* Format the topic listing.
*
* @ingroup themeable
*/
//function theme_forum_topic_list($tid, $topics, $sortby, $forum_per_page) {
global $forum_topic_list_header;

$forum_topic_list_header = array(
array('data' => ' ', 'field' => NULL),
array('data' => t('Topic'), 'field' => 'n.title'),
array('data' => t('Replies'), 'field' => 'l.comment_count'),
// array('data' => t('Created'), 'field' => 'n.created'),
// array('data' => t('Last reply'), 'field' => 'l.last_comment_timestamp'),
);

if ($topics) {

foreach ($topics as $topic) {
// folder is new if topic is new or there are new comments since last visit
if ($topic->tid != $tid) {
$rows[] = array(
array('data' => theme('forum_icon', $topic->new, $topic->num_comments, $topic->comment_mode, $topic->sticky), 'class' => 'icon'),
array('data' => check_plain($topic->title), 'class' => 'title'),
array('data' => l(t('This topic has been moved'), "forum/$topic->tid"), 'colspan' => '3')
);
}
else {
$rows[] = array(
array('data' => theme('forum_icon', $topic->new, $topic->num_comments, $topic->comment_mode, $topic->sticky), 'class' => 'icon'),
array('data' => l($topic->title, "node/$topic->nid"), 'class' => 'topic'),
array('data' => $topic->num_comments . ($topic->new_replies ? ''. l(format_plural($topic->new_replies, '1 new', '@count new'), "node/$topic->nid", NULL, NULL, 'new') : ''), 'class' => 'replies'),
//array('data' => _forum_format($topic), 'class' => 'created'),
//array('data' => _forum_format(isset($topic->last_reply) ? $topic->last_reply : NULL), 'class' => 'last-reply')
);
}
}
}

$output = theme('table', $forum_topic_list_header, $rows);
$output .= theme('pager', NULL, $forum_per_page, 0);

print theme('table', $forum_topic_list_header, $rows);

**********

Now I also noticed that somewhere along the way I had lost the pagination along the bottom of the forum topics list pages (if the number of forum topics was over the max per page). This effectivily was hiding a lot of my forum threads from my users.

To get around this I placed the following code right after the last row of code written above...

print theme('pager');

I now have the pagination "1,2 Next Last" etc at the bottom of each forum topic list once more.

Now, in theory, you should have a Drupal 5.x site with a customized forum topic list - which only displays the topic's title and the number of replies.

I make no guarantees that this is the correct way to do things, but it seems to be working ok on my site. I'd welcome any feedback or corrections!