Common Tasks

Here's a few solutions to problems and scenarios likely to be encountered. Feel free to edit this page with more.

Displaying information in tabs

Tabs are a very nice way to group related data and avoid "information overload" - showing too much on the page at once, which can be overwhelming for the user.

All Form Tools themes provide some sort of presentation for tabs. Precisely how it appears it up to the theme developer, but generally they're all rendered as tab-like structures.

See the Hello Tabs! example module for a simple illustration of how to implement tabs into your module. Basically it works by passing a special $tabs variable to the template, then calling the tabset_open.tpl and tabset_close.tpl templates in your template. They do the job of rendering the tab information that you passed to it.

Displaying pagination

Often you may have too much information to display on a single page, and need to add some simple pagination links (« 1 2 3 ...) to let the user see the information a page at a time. Form Tools comes with two different mechanisms to allow for this: DHTML pagination and regular server-side navigation.

pagination.tpl

$page_vars["pagination"] = ft_get_page_nav($num_results, $num_pages_per_page, $page, "");