How to display a Drupal 6.20 menu in WordPress? - php

Question

Is is possible to display (via php) the main menu of a Drupal 6.20 site in a WordPress theme template file located in a subdirectory on the same domain?
Right now, I'm displaying the menu by copying the static html from the Drupal site and adding it to header.php in the WordPress template in the site located in mydomain.com/blog/. But of course that's not going to work when another menu item is added to the Drupal site, or the Drupal menu is changed in any way.
So is there a Drupal php function that will pull the menu into the WP file?
Failing that, is there a way with php to parse a Drupal page for the html of the menu (yes, this would be ugly) and display it in WP?

Answer 1

The first part of the challenge is to output only the menu, with as little (or none) of the surrounding HTML as possible, so you have as little work to do in parsing the HTML as possible.
The second part is to take that output from Drupal and actually display it on your WordPress site.
You could add the Drupal database as a secondary database in WordPress using the a new instance of the $wpdb object, write the query to get the right content from the tables, and format the results. That could work, but might be overkill.
An alternative workable option may be to use JSON to format the output of the primary links, using the drupal_json function in Drupal, then consume the JSON feed in Wordpress.
I'm assuming:
you have admin access to login to the Drupal site, which you'll need to create nodes, and clear the theme cache
you want to output the Primary Links menu, which 90%+ of Drupal sites use. This is probably true, but it is possible your site uses custom menus. If so, this is still possible, you'd just write slightly different code in step 3.
The steps would be:
Create a Drupal node (you can call it anything, it's just a placeholder)
Get the node id of your dummy page (ie., node/234). From the node id, create a one-off page template in your Drupal site's themes folder. It should be called page-node-xxxx.tpl.php, with xxxx being your node id
Add this code to page-node-xxxx.tpl.php:
<?php
drupal_json(menu_navigation_links(variable_get('menu_primary_links_source', 'primary-links')));
?>
This will create a JSON feed of your menu items.
Clear the theme cache of your Drupal site by visiting http://yoursite.com/admin/build/themes and visit http://yoursite.com/node/xxxx to see the raw JSON feed.
You should now be able to use a jQuery method like $.getJSON or $.ajax in your Wordpress theme to consume and display the JSON feed, or possibly use json_decode and curl to output your array as HTML.
A good thing about Drupal's drupal_json function is that it already sends the correct JSON headers, so now all you have to do is write the jQuery or PHP that does what you need.
I'm assumed you are more of a Wordpress specialist and have a working knowledge of Drupal but maybe not a lot of familiarity with its inner workings. So, sorry if it seemed too basic (or not basic enough :).

Answer 2

The Drupal theming engine is very modular - you may be able to make an appropriate PHP call into Drupal to get just the menu rendered, then emit that HTML as a part of your WordPress page.

Answer 3

g_thom's answer is very good and if you wish to create a very simple module to output the main navigation you can write something like this:
<?php
function getmenus_help($path, $arg) {
// implementing the help hook ... well, not doing anything with it just now actually
}
function getmenus_all() {
$page_content = '';
$page_content = json_encode(menu_navigation_links(variable_get('menu_primary_links_source', 'primary-links')));
// fill $page_content with the menu html
print $page_content;
return NULL;
}
function getmenus_menu() {
$items = array();
$items['getmenus'] = array(
'title' => 'Get Menus',
'page callback' => 'getmenus_all',
'access arguments' => array('access getmenus'),
'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
);
return $items;
}
// permissions
function getmenus_perm() {
return array('access getmenus');
}
In your PHP code you can then write something like:
function primary_links() {
$primary_links = file_get_contents(SITE_URL . '/getmenus');
$primary_links = json_decode($primary_links);
$primary_links = (array)$primary_links;
$i = 0;
$last = count($primary_links);
$output = '';
foreach ($primary_links as $pm) {
$href = $pm->href;
if (strpos($pm->href, 'http://') === FALSE) {
if ($pm->href == '<front>') {
$href = SITE_URL . '/';
} else {
$href = SITE_URL . '/' . $pm->href;
}
}
$output .= '
<li>
'.$pm->title.'</li>';
$i++;
}
return $output;
}
I hope this helps!
PS: Make sure you update the module's permissions to allow anonymous users to have access to the path you set in your module - otherwise you will get a 403 Permission Denied.