skiFFie Making Drupal Mobile!

3 weeks of playing with Drupal v6 later here are a few thoughts of what I have seen so far. The overall appeal of Drupal is still there, though there are still the same inevitable hard-ships that make you wonder is this really worth all the hassle?. Please bear in mind that most of the development is geared towards the accessibility module and some of my gripes may not be that critical to others as it is to me.

Further to a request a couple of months ago regarding mobile themes for Drupal and posted too on Drupal - forum thread I decided to investigate Drupal v6 in a bit more detail. Since the request was about themes I decided to see what theming had to offer in the new version. Creating a "skin" was fairly straight forward. It is even possible to set content type headers within the template.php file. However the first hurdle that I came across that I am still facing is adding accesskeys to the primary_links variable.

In previous versions I had achieved this through module theming. However, I decided to see if this was possible just by using a theme override this time. I have tried numerous variations and am currently trying through phptemplate_links(). To my dismay though the main l() function has changed and I am really unsure on how to add the accesskey attribute to the link. In prior versions of Drupal I would have used the following:

function theme_accessibility_primary_links($links) {
$output = '';
#
if (count($links) > 0) {
$num_links = count($links);
$i = 1;
#
foreach ($links as $link) {
$html = isset($link['html']) && $link['html'];
#
$link['query'] = isset($link['query']) ? $link['query'] : NULL;
$link['fragment'] = isset($link['fragment']) ? $link['fragment'] : NULL;
#
if (isset($link['href'])) {
$output .= l($link['title'], $link['href'], array_merge($link['attributes'], array('accesskey' => $i)), $link['query'], $link['fragment'], FALSE, $html);
}
else if ($link['title']) {
if (!$html) {
$link['title'] = check_plain($link['title']);
}
$output .= $link['title'];
}
$output .= ' | ';
$i++;
}
}
return empty($output) ? '' : substr($output, 0, -3);
}

I would then call the menu: <?php print theme('accessibility_primary_links', $primary_links) ?> However, this does not work in Drupal v6. To this end the current code that I have is as follows, though it does not add anything to the links.

function phptemplate_links($links = array(), $attributes = array('class' => 'links'))
{
$delimiter = " | ";
// Display the left cap of the 'button bar'
//print "[";
$link_count = count($links);
$current = 1;
$output = '';
foreach ( $links as $lnk ) {
// Print the link
//print_r($lnk); //Array ( [title] => TITLE [href] => # [attributes] => Array ( ) )
$output .= l($lnk['title'], $lnk['href'], array('accesskey' => $current, 'title' => $lnk['title']) );
// Only print the delimiter if not the last link
if ( $current < $link_count ) {
$output .= $delimiter;
}
$current++;
}
return $output;
}

This is where I am at currently. It is driving me nuts. Why is it so hard to amend these links to make your site more accessible to others? Any comments or help would be very much appreciated.