Change Template for a Content

Question

I'm using Drupal (version 7) for the first time and I have two content types, Landing Page and Article Page, each with their own templates page--landing_page.tpl.php and article_page.tpl.php respectively. The only reason I have two content types is because each content type needs to be displayed differently on the website.

I have several contents of the type Landing Page which I would like to display with the page--article_page.tpl.php template. So now I have the troublesome task of manually converting each of these content types to Article Page.

Is there a more effective way for a user to select the template he wants to use for a content instead of changing content types?

Answer 1

I ended up using "template suggestions" feature of drupal 7. Now I only have one content type called Article Page. I added a custom field to it called field_template, which takes the name of the template i want to use not including the page-- prefix and not including the .tpl.php suffix. So if field_template has the value 'landingpage', then the template will be 'page--landingpage.tpl.php';

Then in my ~/sites/all/themes/THEMENAME/template.php file, I wrote the following function

function THEMENAME_process_page(&$variables) {
  if (array_key_exists('node', $variables))
  {
        if($variables['node']->field_template['en'][0]['value'])
        {
        $variables['theme_hook_suggestions'] = array('page__'.$variables['node']->field_template['en'][0]['value']);
        }
        else
        $variables['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'page__'. $variables['node']->type;
  }
}

Replace THEMENAME with the name of your theme.