Drupal snippet

Its relatively easy to hide content in Drupal using CSS, however its a whole different ball game to hide content and keep it accessible to all site visitors. Disabled web users may be using a screen reader or other Assistive Technology. For Drupal 7 we wanted a way to hide content that worked in all browsers and avoided many of the issues associated with current techniques.

The idea was to develop a new CSS class that could be applied to any element we needed to hide. We called this class .element-invisible and set about testing properties and values to make this work, in all browsers and all AT devices. First lets look at some of the current techniques we looked into and tested for Drupal 7, then I’ll introduce a new technique I came up using the little known clip property and see how it stacks up - I think you’ll be intrigued.

NOTE: I have submitted a feature request to Drupal 7 to have this included in core - if you have some opinion on that please see Field Type Template Suggestions

Today I finally got around to testing out the new field suggestions in Drupal 7. If you’re not familiar with the standard suggestions in short you can either use field templates or override theme_field using a naming convention not unlike we do with preprocess functions. What struck me as kind of odd was the lack suggestions for field types—maybe there’s a very good reason for this such as performance, I don’t know, but I thought it might be interesting to see if I could use them, if I wanted to.

Drupal’s template suggestions are plentiful and pretty powerful stuff, however, given all the options there are some noteable oversights. In particular the ability to use page-taxonomy suggestions per vocabulary, something like page-vocab-1.tpl.php to theme all taxonomy term pages in vocabulary 1 (where 1 is the VID or vocabulary id).

To achieve this we turn to our trusty preprocess_page function which by now every Drupal themer worth his or her salt knows all about.