Drupal 7 Tutorial: Creating Edit Content links in Views
Update: Use this module
Old Method: Views can be very handy, but the views interface can be a little tricky. A question that comes up when training clients is "Why can't I edit this content?" when they are looking at a view. If you use the node row style Views will add them for you, but not if you're using the field style. You can surely explain how views work (results may vary depending on the client), but an even easier method is to create edit links that link directly to your content items. Using this method creates a handy little gear button when you roll over the content, with a link that says "Edit Content" when you click on it.
The latest version of views for Drupal 7 has revamped the UI. I'll be using this version in the examples, but the same technique can still be used in the old UI.
Step 1: Add the Edit Link field to your view
- In the latest version of Views this field is called "Content: Edit Link". In the previous versions it was "Node: Edit Link"
- Click Add under Fields and select the Edit Link
Step 2: Add the wrappers and classes
- Add a div wrapper to the entire field and label, and give it the class name of
contextual-links-region . - Add a div wrapper to the field itself and give it a class name of
contextual-links-wrapper
Step 3: Rewrite the Field
- Check the "Rewrite the output of this field" checkbox and enter this into the box:
- [edit_node]
. This adds the actual list and list elements and uses the token of the field itself.
Step 4: Hide if empty
- Check the "Hide if Empty" checkbox.
Step 5: Add styles
- Make sure this new link doesn't interfere with other links. I usually add
top:15; to the style of the links to ensure it doesn't mess with the "Edit View" link. - Change the gear color. Now that you have this fancy button on every little content item, you may get some instances where the little grey gear is hard to see.
You can now see the gear button when hovering over the view. In a perfect world, the dotted line would wrap the entire content row and only appear when hovered over that piece of content, not the entire view, but using this method can add a very nice shortcut for your users quickly.
Comments
you did notice you mention
you did notice you mention content edit links, but your view picks *comment* edit links, right?
Good Catch
I have fixed the picture, thanks.
Boris
Thu, 04/14/2011 - 13:54
Gear color
You've recommended changing the gear color. But how can this be achieved? Exchanging the icon file,or using CSS?
Gear color
I redefine the class and point to a new image.
Tue, 04/19/2011 - 06:10
Love it
Thanks for this quick yet incredibly useful tip. Keep em coming!
Steven
Mon, 07/11/2011 - 01:28
Cheers for that, exactly what
Cheers for that, exactly what I was looking for...
Fri, 08/05/2011 - 16:23
Valid HTML
Hi,
When I try this trick, the HTML I get is what follows :
<div class="views-field views-field-edit-node contextual-links-region">
<div class="field-content contextual-links-wrapper contextual-links-processed">
<a href="#" class="contextual-links-trigger">Configure</a>
<a href="/content/node1#overlay=node/1/edit%3Fdestination%3Dnode/1">
<ul class="contextual-links" style="display: none;">
<li>edit</li>
</ul>
</a>
</div>
</div>That sounds quite wrong to put a <ul> in a <a> tag.
Is it what's expected ?
David
Very True
This may not produce proper strict validation, but from the limited amount of research I've just done on it (Thanks Dylan!), it does pass html5 validators. If you need XHTML transitional, then you may need to dig into the templates. This is just a simple way for the more UI-inclined to provide extra functionality for users. It may not be the solution for everyone, but it does work as intended.
Thanks,
Dan
But
However, it only will affect for logged in user, so it possibly broke up the html validation but it's a simpler solution for increase Admin UX. Nice tip ;)
Tue, 09/06/2011 - 08:21
Conversion to Drupal
Folks,
Currently my site is on Wordpress CMS After seeing so many possiblity with Drupal, i believe i should migrate my CMS from WP to Drupal.
Can someone refer some tutorial where i can migrate my CMS? Please?
Big Question...
Could be bigger than a simple tutorial. While I'm sure a google search will turn up more than a couple tutorials, I will point you to this Drupal Module. It's designed specifically for helping with a conversion from WordPress: http://drupal.org/project/wordpress_migrate
Tom A
Sun, 09/11/2011 - 11:34
Great Trick! Works like a charm... however...
Now you have me wondering... I tried setting this up to edit a particular custom field in my user profile... is it possible to call out an individual field to edit instead of the entire profile? I built the edit link around a custom field I have in the user table, but no matter how I try to specify the custom field it just brings up the entire profile to edit. Can I use "edit_node" and then the token for the field? Any ideas would be awesome!
Fri, 11/04/2011 - 13:48
Thank you
This is a great tip, I never had any idea this could even be done. Much better solution than the crazy ideas I had for trying to maintain this content.
Mon, 11/14/2011 - 23:04
Lullabot just released the
Lullabot just released the Custom Contextual Links Module to provide this functionality in a more... modular way.
Cool
I was about to starting coding a module for that.
However, from looking at the module, it doesn't look like it will have the ability to add the edit links to 'field' views. Until then, we'll have to keep doing it in this... administrative way.
You're mistaken
I just did it with this module. You should really consider to update your tutorial since imho using the mentionend module (http://drupal.org/project/ccl) is the way to go. For several reasons. Perfect markup, faster with far more possibilities.
Anyways, your idea is great and if there was no module like ccl I would do it the same way. Thanks.
Updated
Pretty sure that feature wasn't available when I commented that over a year ago, but it's matured now. I've updated the tutorial.
Tue, 11/15/2011 - 00:23
... which is only a Drupal 6
... which is only a Drupal 6 port of core Drupal 7 feature, and, I guess, doesn't replace current post tip. ;)
Miguel
Tue, 11/22/2011 - 10:21
links in more than one li
Hi friends, i have a table with view in drupal 7, one field of a row have various
Example:
normal style
-------------------
! column !
! quality !
-------------------
! !
!
! !
-------------------
my style
-------------------
! column !
! quality !
-------------------
! !
!
!
!
!
! !
------------------- --> now always same link in all links.
i want to solve...
-------------------
! column !
! quality !
-------------------
! !
!
!
!
!
! !
------------------- --> now always same link in all links.
Very thks...
See you.
Miles
Sun, 12/04/2011 - 09:23
Great trick!
This is a very clean solution. Even if there were a module for this, I think I'd still prefer to add a couple wrappers in Views. Thanks for documenting it so nicely!
Sun, 12/04/2011 - 17:03
Just what I was looking for!
Awesome tutorial. This is just the functionality I was looking for — I had seen that the Custom Contextual Links module didn't handle Views, so I was about to try to write some custom code when I found your tutorial. I implemented this in about 2 minutes, and it works perfectly.
alwor
Mon, 12/05/2011 - 23:04
Roles and visiility
Do you know why it is, that this works perfectly for me as logged in as admin,but is not visible to the "editor" role i created? (They do have the context. links permission set). Logged in as editor I can see that the code is there, but no gear icon. Also, if I make a view that consist only of the "edit content: link" field, and give it a label, it will show up (when hovering the label, only) and it works. Is there aother permission i must set?
I am having a similar permisisons issue
Logged in as admin the menu works as expected, however, logged in as authenticated user/editor it just show the edit link. The only way I could get it to work was to give the editor/authenticated user access to edit views which I dont want. Do you know why this might be happening?
stephen Piscura
Wed, 02/15/2012 - 21:21
Here's a great post which
Here's a great post which explains how to do this at the theme level (check out the comments for how to do it in Drupal 7).
Also, this does make provision for:
In a perfect world, the dotted line would wrap the entire content row and only appear when hovered over that piece of content, not the entire view...
Both are great methods. Just thought users would like to know that, like everything in Drupal, there's more than one way...
jlong
Sun, 02/19/2012 - 05:46
views on content creation
hi thanks for this tutorial. One question, can views be used to display fields in a table form in content creation page? So that contributors may input data in the fields in a tabular form?
Preprocess for that
You're much better off writing a preprocess hook that will modify the form for you. You could also look at some different admin themes that could help with that. Using views to do it could possibly be done, but I think that's the most complicated of the ways I just mentioned.
Thanks.
Ok. Thank you!
Thu, 07/19/2012 - 07:20
Good one
I really thanks for this info.
really rocks
Fri, 10/19/2012 - 08:53
Awesome
Thanks for this tutorial. It really helped me out !
sirtet
Fri, 01/24/2014 - 19:51
Views 3.x has a new trick to do that:
Ok, the post is old, but it still helped me, where the "new" way below did not work:
Now you can add the field Global:contextual links to your view, which will show output any other fields in a contextual links-menu.
Maybe you want to update the post again?
Matthew Trow
Mon, 02/03/2014 - 15:17
Custom view templates - note
Just a note, if you've created custom view template files, specifically field templates, two things, you'll need to add the edit field to your views template, as in:
<?php print $fields['edit_node']->content; ?>
You'll also want to not select 'Hide if empty', else the above will error.
Anonymous
Sat, 01/03/2015 - 06:53
why every article describes
why every article describes about contextual link but not about how to show just edit icon in place of edit text using rewrite method. Is this so difficult?
Capi Etheriel
Tue, 04/12/2011 - 23:32