$links the garbage can of node.tpl

As you may know theres ways to view all the wonderful elements that is hidden inside node.tpl files, and how you can find em' by using the nerdy module:
Devel module. Its an alpha omega module.

Well if youre scared of using dsm('$node'); just look at it as if it was a way of viewing the html source - see now its not so scary ;)

the garbage can of node.tpl

Inside a basic node.tpl.php file theres a lot of variables defined (http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules--node--node.tpl.php/6 ) that can be used for your basic design needs. One of them have always pissed me off more than anything else is the $links!:

So whats wrong with the $links variable you might ask. Its a quick way to get the read more, number of comment, atachments etc in you node.
And if you wanna modify it, you can just use overwrite THEME_links() (http://api.drupal.org/api/function/theme_links/6) and modify it anyway you want to.

So the problem comes in if you wanna use one of the elements thats inside $links and wanna place it in another place.

Lets look at the note.tpl.php

If you just wants to modify the markup of $links use the drupal theme function that generates the $links variable THEME_links() (http://api.drupal.org/api/function/theme_links/6)
But thats not what we wanna do - We wanna move the number of comments up to the left of the date of the node so the markup we wants is something like this:

Lets get nerdy nerdy

• kudos for knowing where that line is taken from and geekyfied.

We know whats wrong: $links is being build by drupal and we cant use it for anything, cause its already build :(
okay - deep breath now... So lets start by checking out if all that info should be hidden inside the node ...yeah the evil developer are hiding it from us .. ;)
In youre node.tpl.php add this line

or use the theme developer module and click you way.

oh and just to make it a bit more complicated the values of $links are changing if by where your watching it from (it dosnt make so much sense to have a link to a node youre allready on ;)) Take a look a the node on the frontpage (site.org/node/), or another overview page - taxonomy pages (site.org/taxonomy/term/[termid]) and compare it to the whole node view (node/[nid]) see the difference?

Lets look at the number of comments out of the $node:

Now we have the array set that holds the information about the number of comments.

If you just wanna get the job done you could write it directly into the node.tpl:

$links is kicked out cause we dont wanna have the information repeated.

I know that another aproach could be to just do a print $node->comment_count, but we wanna have the link to the comments, so a user can click on the link from the frontpage and go to the comments.

If you wanna do it - Do it right

To build the link were gonna dig a bit deeper into the world of Drupal so please welcome: the L funktion,l as in link (or looser or lame or ): l();
The link function looks like this:

api page -> http://api.drupal.org/api/function/l/6

Yup its maybe a bit overkill to do it this way, but now its possible for other themes & modules to manipulate with your link - the power behind having a framework.
hmm WTF are we theming or developing .. oh well lets just get this link stuff done

Heres the $node->links['comment_comments'] splitted out to create a link

To get this into node.tpl we could do something like this:

Now the node.tpl is beginning to look a bit ugly, and were doing custom work into the node.tpl, so if we later wanna have variant of the node.tpl (node-blog.tpl.php, node-page.tpl.php, node-news.tpl.php) we would end up having the link generating code in multiple places - and stuff like that always comes back and bites you.

template.php & preprocess

So strap on you helmet cause were diving in a bit deeper (and all this for a couple of links! holy crap batman...).
Instead of putting all this stuff inside the node.tpl you can throw the link creation code into the template.php file and clean up you node.tpl

I wont get into to much specific of the template.php file- or read this page http://drupal.org/node/11811. To put it short template.php is where you should put all you "logic" - so all modifications of variables, array sets and other code stuff should go there (I must confess that some simple if/else ends up in my node.tpl...)
But to make the story short create a template.php inside youre themes directory root, so if youre theme is inside the folder "foo" it should be in foo/template.php.

In the template.php you can put all that geeky php "programming" stuff, so youre node.tpl's can begin to look pretty and clean again:

To add new variable that can be used in the node.tpl, you add must add it to the $vars variable. So by adding : $vars['NEW_VARNAME'] in the preprocess_node() function, you get acces to it in the node.tpl
So by using the preprocess_node code above we now have these spanky hot new variables:

Now the node.tpl can look something like this:

wooho now we have the control back over the $links yeah instant win!
... offcourse only until some module decides to add more stuff to the $links (ahem)

That was easy right for moving a link a bit right ;)
The cool think now is that you can reuse this in you themes if you add it into you template.php - this is (off course) added to the mighty mothership theme so if you dont wanna play around with template.php's n stuff its all prepared for you there.

main pict license:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/selva/ / CC BY-NC 2.0