trouble with a view template

Question

I created a block view and am having trouble controlling the out put. Theme developer tells me the candidate template file is views-view-fields.tpl.php that file doesn't look like any of the others I have worked on. I have found the only control I have over the output is through the view settings itself. Why can't I format the output like any other block or page?

Answer 1

In a nutshell, once you have your view fields ordered in the view itself, you would override views-view-fields.tpl.php to change the row. In there, it has something like this:

<?php foreach ($fields as $id => $field): ?>
  <?php if (!empty($field->separator)): ?>
    <?php print $field->separator; ?>
  <?php endif; ?>

  <?php print $field->wrapper_prefix; ?>
    <?php print $field->label_html; ?>
    <?php print $field->content; ?>
  <?php print $field->wrapper_suffix; ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>

which just cycles through each of those fields and outputs them. So, if you wanted to wrap two fields in a div, you would put some logic like this in there:

<?php if ($id=="MYFIRSTFIELD"): ?>
  <div class="mini_text">
<?php endif; ?>

and put that before the wrapper_prefix php, and put something like this before the closing endforeach:

<?php if ($id=="MYLASTFIELD"): ?>
  </div>
<?php endif; ?>

which would create that mini_text div you mentioned. Anyways, hope this helps, I cut and pasted and coded quickly here, but this should give you an idea of how to do it, even if there are typos in there ;)

Answer 2

I've experienced the same issues with my conversion from D5.x to D6.x and what I ended up doing was to install the Semantic-Views module. It allows, at a row/field level the ability to add classes to each field. Not only does this work well it is a heck of a lot easier than creating and maintaining a tpl.php file. Try it, you'll like it.