Override Theme Functions from Drupal 7 Module

8/5/2012

Have you ever really, truly hated the theme output of Drupal core or contrib module and really wanted to override it? In your theme function, it’s easy enough, function YOURTHEME_themename($vars). That’s all fine and dandy, but what if you really want to do it from a module, like, say, if you’re creating a responsive image solution and need to add a noscript fallback? Well, I can now tell you that yes you can! It’s as simple as one overlooked hook and, well, writing you own function! Let’s take a look at how.

This whole thing boils down to one hook, hook_theme_registry_alter . The hook is pretty simple, it goes a little something like this:

/**
 * Implements hook_theme_registry_alter
 */
function mymodule__theme_registry_alter(&$theme_registry) {
  $theme_registry['theme_name']['theme path'] = 'path/to/your/module';
  $theme_registry['theme_name']['function'] = 'mymodule_function_name';
}

'theme_name' is the name of the theme function you want to change, so if you wanted to alter the image style theme, you’d put

‘image_style’

there. The theme path is the path to the module where the function is stored, but not the file itself, so you can plug in the output of drupal_get_path() directly into it. All of the previous hook_preprocess and hook_process functions that are already written for the theme you’re overriding will still work, so you can happily use this and be compatible with other modules!

A couple of things to note about your custom function. First, you don’t need to write a full theme function to use this, just a plain old function will do as long as it takes the same input as the original function. Second, if you want to use the output of another theme function, especially, say, the one you’re overriding so you can add to its output, you can call the function directly (in the case of image style, you can call php theme_image_style($vars)) and keep on going. And don’t forget to return something!