Drupal 7 - What is the variable in template.php that dictates which page template is used?

Question

Ok, here's the deal: I am constructing a Drupal website that has several different sections. Each section is a view that displays a content type. (Each section has it's own content type) For example, I have a view that points to ?q=blog which displays content type blog.

All the sections look a little different than each other. Not like 'website-within-a-website' different but different enough that they can't all use the same template file and each be modified with CSS. Each section needs it's own page.tpl.php.

Unfortunately, AFAIK Drupal theme's .info files can only either assign one page.tpl.php for the entire theme or assign a page-node-####.tpl.php for each node. There is going to be lots of content on this website so setting Drupal to make a new identical page-node-####.tpl.php for every created node would get unmanagable very fast.

To solve this problem, I am going to use pathauto to create an alias for each content type. For example, all nodes of content type blog are given an alias ?q=blog/[post title]. Modify template.php to use page-blog.tpl.php for any page who's alias starts with the word 'blog'.

Other people have tried doing this sort of thing and have created functions such as the one described. Unfortunately, all the ones I have seen are for Drupal 6 or below. I have tried modifying existing ones with no success. So far, though, I think this is on the right track:

function basic_preprocess_page(&$vars, $hook) {
    ...

    if( module_exists('path') ) {
        $alias = drupal_get_path_alias( $_GET['q'] );
        $site_section = "blog";
        if( strpos( $alias, $site_section ) === 0 ) {
            $VARIABLE_THAT_TELLS_THE_PAGE_WHAT_TEMPLATE_TO_USE = "/path/to/page-blog.php";
        }
    }
}

I cannot find $VARIABLE_THAT_TELLS_THE_PAGE_WHAT_TEMPLATE_TO_USE does anyone know what it is?

Maybe my site is structured badly. If anyone knows how to restructure my site so I can more easily make a theme with seperate sections please share how!

Thanks a million! (c:

EDIT: Perhaps I need to use template suggestions instead. Does anyone know the function or variable to use to set this?

Answer 1

They changed the name of this array key in D7 and I haven't seen it documented anywhere. I finally figured this out after a good bit of debugging. You can override the theme template in template.php with a hook_preprocess_page() like so:

function myTheme_preprocess_page(&$vars) {
global $node;

if ($node->type == 'blog') {
     $vars['theme_hook_suggestions'] = array('my__blog_template'); // use my--blog-template.tpl.php, note '-' = '_'
}
elseif ($node->type == 'articles') {
    $vars['theme_hook_suggestions'] = array('article__node_template'); // use article--node-template.tpl.php
}
}

Oh and don't forget to flush the Drupal caches after making changes to your template.php.