Nick Lewis: The Blog

In this first tutorial, you will learn how to:

1. override the default presentation of the user login form, and create a custom template for it.
2. pass an editable node into the user login form
3. alter the form’s values (such as text, and instructions)
4. make the form available to page.tpl.php — as though it was something as simple as a footer.

Moreover, I will show you how bloody simple it is. Folks who follow this tutorial should already have:

1. knowledge of PHP
2. the ability to lie about a lack of knowledge of PHP
3. some familiarity of the kindergarden basics of drupal theming
4. Be working with drupal 4.7+

Step One: Override the deafult user login form

Overriding is always done in the theme’s template.php file (if you don’t have a template.php file, you may create a it now). Obviously, before you can override anything, you must first locate what you are trying to override. The best way to do this is to search a module for the $form variable.

Michael Angeles' post on creating different looks for different sections by switching body classes and ID's inspired me to write up a related method.

The advantages of this method are that it dynamically builds classes on the basis of vocabulary and term that allow you to have wildy different styles for every node.

This method requires two parts, one snippet in your template.php file, and a special body tag in your page.tpl.php file.