Drupal 7 Module Development

Chapter 3
The preceding example shows the full gamut of the things that you are likely see
in a template file. They are as follows:
• Printing a variable containing a string
• Printing a translatable string using t()
• Conditional if/else/endif statement
• Delaying rendering on part of a render element with hide()
• Printing a render element
All of the PHP in a template should be limited to printing out variables. This limited
amount of PHP makes it much easier for non-programmers to learn how to use
template files compared to theme functions. However, for module developers, the
template implementation is still very similar to the theme function implementation;
the handful of differences are relatively minor.
As with theme function implementations, our module would still need to invoke the
theme hook using theme().
$variables = array('typical' => $typical_object);
$output = theme('typical_hook', $variables);
[ 71 ]