How to hide Edit | View tabs ?

Question

Can I hide the

Edit | View

tabs on top of each node ?

I've searched for this option in theme settings (both global and standard theme but I couldn't find it).

I still want to be able my customer to edit / administer content, so I cannot just remove the permission for it.

thanks

Answer 1

I use the following in template.php by theme (which is perhaps a little hacky, I feel I should be considering unsetting $tabs instead):

function THEME_NAME_menu_local_tasks() {
  return '';
}

Or you could ommit:

if ($tabs) echo $tabs;

from your page.tpl.php...

Answer 2

View and Edit are functional features. They have a reason for being there.

The best way to "remove" them, is to "remove" that functionality alltogether. After all: why remove the interface of a piece of functionality, but not the functionality itself? Besides, simply not printing the tabs, does not remove the url endpoints. In other words: if you don't print the edit tab, people can still access the edit page.

Again: best is to remove that functionality: The fact that you don't want the edit tab, sounds as if you don't want the edit functionality for certain users. If so, then just remove that permission for that role. That is all. The tabs will be gone.

If, however, you simply wish to display these tabs differently, Drupal is your friends. As you may have noticed, they are called local tasks and not tabs. That is because the theme decides how to render them: The theme is the thing that decides to show them as tabs.

Simply override the theme_menu_local_tasks() to create your own HTML for the "local-tasks". And in your page-tpl, simply move the $tabs variable around to a place, where you want them.

But again: Don't try to change the behavior of the app, by removing interface-elements. That is not the right thing to do: you should change the behavior, in order to change the behavior :)

Answer 3

On the module side, you could do something that decouples the Edit's menu entry from the local tasks for the node:

function custom_menu_alter(&$items) {
  $items['node/%node/edit']['type'] = MENU_CALLBACK;
}

The edit path is still there, but now it is not associated with the View tab. This includes the edit page itself--no View tab there.

Answer 4

This really is a presentational thing, not a functionality thing, so it should be done at the theme level.

The problem with overriding theme_menu_local_tasks() is that you override/take a hatchet to the entire local task display, when you really just want to get in there with a scalpel to remove two specific local tasks. So, you need to get a little more specific.

theme_menu_local_tasks() gets the current page's local tasks and passes them to menu_local_tasks(). Here, two theme functions are used:

1. theme_menu_item_link(), which gets the link markup for the task
2. theme_menu_local_task(), which gets the <li> element for the task.

So, you can get rid of the View and Edit local tasks in a really robust way by overriding theme_menu_item_link() and theme_menu_local_task() to include your check for them:

function mytheme_menu_item_link($link) {
  // Local tasks for view and edit nodes shouldn't be displayed.
  if ($link['type'] & MENU_LOCAL_TASK && ($link['path'] === 'node/%/edit' || $link['path'] === 'node/%/view')) {
    return '';
  }
  else {
    if (empty($link['localized_options'])) {
      $link['localized_options'] = array();
    }

    return l($link['title'], $link['href'], $link['localized_options']);
  }
}

function mytheme_menu_local_task($link, $active = FALSE) {
  // Don't return a <li> element if $link is empty
  if ($link === '') {
    return '';
  }
  else {
    return '<li '. ($active ? 'class="active" ' : '') .'>'. $link ."</li>\n";  
  }
}

This way, you're relying on the menu router path, not modifying the menu router item, and achieving the result you want with minimal changes to core functionality or theming.