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Automatically generate meta keywords from a node's taxonomy terms
Eric.London's picture
Submitted by Eric.London on 2/4/2009
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Most SEO tutorials claim that meta keywords are not very important to search engines. But, if you insist on inserting meta keywords for each node's taxonomy terms, this tutorial will show you how to accomplish this. I added the following function to my template.php file in my theme.

<?php
function _phptemplate_variables($hook, $vars) {
  // check for page scope
  if ($hook == 'page') {
    // ensure this page is a node view
    if (is_object($vars['node'])) {
      // get a list of taxonomy terms for this node
      $terms = taxonomy_node_get_terms($vars['node']->nid);
           
      // ensure terms exist
      if (is_array($terms)) {

        // loop through terms, and collect the names
        $t = array();
        foreach ($terms as $k => $v) {
          $t[] = $v->name;   
        }
               
        // ensure names exist
        if (is_array($t)) {
          // implode the terms into a string and add to the head variable
          $vars['head'] .= "<meta name='keywords' content='" . implode(",", $t) . "'>";
        }

      }

    }
       
  }
  return $vars;
}
?>

To verify this code is working, check out the tags I used on this page and then view the source. Hopefully, they match!

(NOTE: my homepage is a view, so there show not be any meta keywords.)

NOTE: when I upgraded my theme to Drupal 6, I had to update this above code:

<?php
function MYTHEME_preprocess_page(&$variables) {
  if (is_object($variables['node']) && is_array($variables['node']->taxonomy)) {
    $tags = array();
    foreach ($variables['node']->taxonomy as $tid => $term) {
      if (!in_array($term->name, $tags)) $tags[] = $term->name;
    }
       
    if (count($tags)) {
      sort($tags);
      $variables['head'] .= "<meta name='keywords' content='" . implode(",", $tags) . "'>";
    }
  }
}
?>

Creating dynamic theme layouts based on the contents of your regions
Eric.London's picture
Submitted by Eric.London on 6/19/2008
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When creating a theme, it's important to keep your layout flexible in order to avoid wasted space. Here's a quick tutorial to show you how to vary theme layouts based on the contents of a region. Consider a common layout that contains 3 columns: sidebar_left, content, and sidebar_right. If the sidebar_right region did not have any blocks assigned to it, you could conserve valuable space by revising your theme layout using CSS and theme variables.

The first thing to do is add a variable to the page.php.tpl scope of your theme. In your template.php file, add a function called _phptemplate_variables. The following code checks the currently assigned variables to see if html has been assigned to the regions. If the region is empty, a variable will be passed to the theme containing CSS class selectors.

<?php
function _phptemplate_variables($hook, $vars=array()) {
  switch($hook) {
    case 'page':
      $layoutClasses = array();
      if (!$vars['sidebar_right']) $layoutClasses[] = 'noSidebarRight';
      if (!$vars['sidebar_left']) $layoutClasses[] = 'noSidebarLeft';
      $vars['layoutClasses'] = implode(' ', $layoutClasses);
      break;
  }
  return $vars;
}
?>

Next, in your page.tpl.php, locate the div in your layout that your like to conditionally change. Add the following code to add the CSS class selectors as necessary.

<?php
<div id='layoutContent' class='<?php print $layoutClasses; ? >' >
  BLAH BLAH BLAH
</div>
?>

Last, you can add CSS to revise your layout. In this case, I'll change the width of my divs.

#layoutContent {
  width: 500px;
}

#layoutContent.noSidebarRight {
  width: 750px;
}

#layoutContent.noSidebarLeft {
  width: 750px;
}

#layoutContent.noSidebarLeft.noSidebarRight {
  width: 1000px;
}

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