Today I needed to customize the themed results of the Drupal search. I have a pretty good thought of the right way to do this and I am going to attempt to do this without accessing any documentation online about the process. That way I can explain the steps of how to do this, in the Drupal way, from my experience and perspective. I will also try and document my thought process in order possibly help others when trying to do similar Drupal customization.

The first step I am going to take is to find out what is driving the Drupal search. Most likely it is a module that is installed in core Drupal so lets go look in the core modules directory and take a look. So, in the modules directory I see the search folder which is a pretty good sign that this is what drives the Drupal search. Now I am going to open the search module folder to see what is inside and also to see what I can customize, keeping in mind that I will not actually be doing any changes to any files in the search module itself.

Inside the search module I find the standard .info, .install, .module and a .css file. I am most interested in looking at the search.module itself. So what am I looking for you may ask, well it is something I can hook into or theme. I use ActiveState Komodo so after opening search.module I select the code tab in my left plane. What this shows me is all the functions that are available from within the the search module and I see the functions I am looking for. theme_search_theme_form, theme_search_block_form, theme_search_item and theme_search_page. I am able to customize any one of these functions in a way that will not touch the actual Drupal core module. Great!

What I am most interested in is how to change the look of the search result page (or srp to all those seo gurus). All I need to do at this point is to remove the line of info that tells who wrote the node, when it was written, comments etc... From a guess, using how the theme functions are named, I decide that theme_search_page function is the one I will customize from within my own theme. And so you know, for this project I am using the zen theme that is located in my /sites/all/themes/zen folder. Here is the theme_search_page which is nicely commented so I can see the parameters that are being passed to this function.

I notice that this function calls the theme_search_items function by way of theme('search_item', $entry, $type) so I now see that this is actually the function that I want to manipulate. This function looks like the following:

So what I do next is to copy all of the above function directly into my template.php file that is found in my /sites/all/themes/zen folder. The template.php file is what you can use in order to indirectly manipulate core Drupal. Not just for search, but for all core modules. I then change the name of the theme_search_item($item, $type) function to zen_search_item($item, $type). After saving the file, Drupal no longer calls search modules function but now calls my theme zen_search_item function. Simply awsome, and now when I have to do a core drupal update, my changes in the theme will not be over written when a core search module update is performed.

Don't forget to change the name of your template.php function or you may get the following error. "Fatal error: Cannot redeclare theme_search_item() (previously declared in....)" I just saying ... this didn't happen to me ;)

Now, lets get to there really good stuff. Because this new zen_search_item function is in my theme, I am pretty free to do whatever I want in order to get the results I desire. So, my quick change of removing the extra info that I mentioned previously can be accomplished by removing the code that contains the extra data that I don't need. My new function in my template.php file now becomes:

So, I know you can see I removed a lot of info but at this point you can go both ways. You can add content, change the elements or do whatever you desire! Happy Drupaling!