How to Customize the Syndicate Feed Icon Block in Drupal

For a recent project I needed to customize the feed icon in the Drupal theme I was creating. This wasn’t as straight forward as I thought it would be. Being the drupal newbie that I am I went looking for it in the core templates and suggestions page only to come empty handed.

Previously I found the solution to theming a search form by using the search-block-form.tpl.php template file and thought there would be one for the feed icon too. I found the solution to this in the function reference in the form of a theme hook.

theme_feed_icon($url, $title)

This function is internally called by drupal to generate the feed icon in the Syndicate block. Our Job is to override this function.

Customizing the feed icon

We cannot redefine the same function in our theme so we must define a phptemplate function to override the default implementation.

function phptemplate_feed_icon($url,$title)

What It Must Do?

This function must return the code of the feed icon. Therefore instead of using a image, you may also use a text link as well as hard code a few options such as Subscribe via Twitter and E-Mail.

Therefore, to use your own subscribe by RSS icon, you may use a function similar to the following:

function phptemplate_feed_icon($url,$title)
{
	global $base_path;
	$path = path_to_theme();
 $feed_icon = '<a href=" '. check_url($url).'" class="feed-icon"><img src="'. $path.'/images/rss-header.png" /></a>';
        return $feed_icon;
}

This function is very simple . It just returns a image which is linked to the $url parameter of the function. This function is to be placed in the template.php file.

Summary

• Syndicate feed icon is customized using the theme_feed_icon template function.
• We use phptemplate_feed_icon($url,$title)  in our function to customize the syndicate feed icon block.
• The function should return the code of the syndicate feed block. This code may also include links to other services such as twitter and subscribing by e-mail.
• The function should be placed in your template.php file.