Drupal 7 Module Development

Chapter 4
Preprocess functions
Our theme hook is now given a $node object, but template files expect variables
containing strings or render elements. So we're going to need to transform the $node
object's data into a series of variables. Technically, we could have performed this
business logic directly inside our single_blog_block_view() function, but instead
we're going to do this transformation in a preprocess function.
That's actually the purpose of the preprocess function: to transform raw data into
variables needed for a theme hook's template or theme function. (Also, recall that
preprocess functions should never query for raw data; the raw data should be
passed as variables.)
Since we own this theme hook, we'll need to define our preprocess function with
a template_ prefix.
/**
* Preprocesses single blog block item variables.
*/
function template_preprocess_single_blog_block_item(&$variables) {
$node = $variables['node'];
To make it easier to access all the object properties of our node variable, we're going
to first create a $node local variable which we'll use inside the preprocess function:
// Create a renderable array for the title.
$variables['title'] = array(
'#type' => 'link',
'#title' => $node->title,
'#href' => 'node/' . $node->nid,
);
Next we'll create the $title variable as a render element; it is identical to what we
saw in the second version of our module:
// Format the creation date of the node.
$variables['created'] = $node->created;
$variables['date'] = format_date($node->created, 'custom',
'F d, Y');
Date timestamps don't make very good render elements, so we'll just create two
variables, one with the raw, unformatted date value and one with formatted date:
// Load the account object with the node's creator and store
// in a variable for themer convenience.
$variables['user'] = user_load($node->uid);
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