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Super-flexible forms in Drupal 5

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February 21, 2008 - 1:14pm by Dan Kurtz
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It's common practice for theme function writers to give every div a class, so that it can be targetted by CSS. For us, this is especially important in forms, since our clients often ask us to lay out forms in complicated ways.

This was a problem in Drupal 5 (and earlier). Although form elements had ids, so specific elements could be accessed from Javascript and CSS, they are all encased in wrapper divs with class "form-item". This means there's no easy way to lay out a specific form item.

It's been solved in the Drupal 6 version of theme_form_element() by adding unique ids to each form-item container. That's great, but what's better is that the new function works fine in Drupal 5. Just copy it into your template.php file and you've got easy-to-theme forms. Just goes to show how a minor code change can go a long way.

Here's the function:


<?php
function theme_form_element($element, $value) {
// This is also used in the installer, pre-database setup.
$t = get_t();

$output = '\n";
$required = !empty($element['#required']) ? '*' : '';

if (!empty($element['#title'])) {
$title = $element['#title'];
if (!empty($element['#id'])) {
$output .= ' '. $t('!title: !required', array('!title' => filter_xss_admin($title), '!required' => $required)) ."\n";
}
else {
$output .= ' '. $t('!title: !required', array('!title' => filter_xss_admin($title), '!required' => $required)) ."\n";
}
}

$output .= " $value\n";

if (!empty($element['#description'])) {
$output .= ' '. $element['#description'] ."\n";
}

$output .= "\n";

return $output;
}
?>