Featured Collections and Featured Works

The TAMU Digital Collections front page displays two curated sections: Featured Collections and Featured Works. These views surface hand-picked content to site visitors by curators. Both sections are driven by Drupal’s core promote field, a Search API Solr view, and a small amount of custom theme code.

How It Works

The overall flow for both sections is identical:

1. An editor checks a “Featured on front page” checkbox on a node edit form.

2. The checkbox saves 1 to the node’s core promote field.

3. A Search API Solr view filters for promote = 1 and renders matching nodes as cards.

4. The view block is placed on the front page and restricted to <front> via block visibility settings.

The Promote Checkbox

Drupal’s promote field exists on all node types but is hidden by default in Archipelago. The TAMU theme exposes it through two hook_form_FORM_ID_alter implementations in web/themes/custom/tamu_theme/tamu_theme.theme.

For Digital Object Collections:

function tamu_theme_form_node_digital_object_collection_edit_form_alter(
    &$form, FormStateInterface $form_state, $form_id)

For Digital Objects:

function tamu_theme_form_node_digital_object_edit_form_alter(
    &$form, FormStateInterface $form_state, $form_id)

Both hooks add a checkbox to the Advanced sidebar of the node edit form and attach a shared submit handler:

function tamu_theme_promote_node_submit($form, FormStateInterface $form_state) {
  $node = $form_state->getFormObject()->getEntity();
  $node->set('promote', (int) $form_state->getValue('tamu_promote'));
  $node->save();
}

Note

After checking or unchecking the box and saving, the Search API Solr index must pick up the change. This usually happens within a few minutes via cron. To force it immediately go to Configuration → Search API → [your index] → Queue all items → Index now.

Solr Index

The promote field must be present in the Search API index for the view filters to work.

1. Go to Configuration → Search API → [index] → Fields.

2. Confirm Promoted to front page is listed (machine name promote, type Integer).

3. If it is missing, click Add fields, find it under Content, add it, save, and re-index.

Warning

You may see the message “Your config-set contains manually added customizations.” after adding this field. This is harmless — it simply means the Solr config was modified through the UI rather than regenerated from scratch. The field will continue to work correctly.

Views

Featured Collections

• View machine name: solr_search_collections

• Display: a dedicated Block display within the collections view

• Filter: Content type = Digital Object Collection AND promote = 1

• Row style: Content rendered in the digital_object_with_thumbnail_for_grid display mode

• Block visibility: restricted to <front>

Featured Works

• View machine name: duplicate_of_collections

• Display: Block display

• Filter: Content type = Digital Object AND promote = 1

• Row style: Content rendered in the digital_object_with_thumbnail_for_grid display mode

• Block visibility: restricted to <front>

Note

The custom_frontpage view (path /node) also filters on promote = 1. To prevent promoted Digital Objects from rendering there in full-node mode, that view has a filter excluding the digital_object content type. If you see a promoted item appearing in an unexpected place, check that view’s filter criteria.

Card / Masonry Rendering

Both sections share the same card and masonry layout used by the collection membership grid.

Display mode

The digital_object_with_thumbnail_for_grid display mode renders each node using:

• DS layout: ds-1col

• Theme template: web/themes/custom/tamu_theme/templates/node/ds-1col--node-digital-object-with-thumbnail-for-grid.html.twig

  This template outputs a .tamu-card wrapper with a thumbnail image region and a title/body region. The thumbnail is produced by the Strawberry Field formatter, which calls the tamu_custom_simple_card_thumbnail metadata display Twig template (stored in Archipelago’s metadata display system, not in the theme file system).

Thumbnail template

Location (in Archipelago’s metadata display UI, not on disk):

tamu_custom_simple_card_thumbnail

This template builds a IIIF Image API URL from the node’s JSON data and renders a plain <img> tag. The image size is controlled by the iiif_size variable at the top of that template (e.g. pct:25 for 25 % of the full image width).

Masonry CSS

The masonry layout is applied by web/themes/custom/tamu_theme/css/cards.css.

The view’s unformatted list template must wrap each row in a plain <div> for the CSS columns layout to work correctly in Firefox:

• Featured Collections template: templates/views/views-view-unformatted--solr-search-collections.html.twig

• Featured Works template: templates/views/views-view-unformatted--duplicate-of-collections.html.twig

Both templates have the same structure:

<div class="tamu-cards-grid w-100">
  {% for row in rows %}
    <div>{{ row.content }}</div>
  {% endfor %}
</div>

The tamu-cards-grid class triggers the CSS columns grid. Without the inner <div> wrapper, Firefox renders all cards in a single row instead of columns.

Adding a Featured Item

Collections

1. Edit the Digital Object Collection node.

2. In the Advanced sidebar, check Featured on front page.

3. Save.

4. Wait for Solr to re-index (or force it manually).

5. The collection will appear in the Featured Collections block on the front page.

Digital Objects (Works)

1. Edit the Digital Object node.

2. In the Advanced sidebar, check Featured on front page.

3. Save.

4. Wait for Solr to re-index (or force it manually).

5. The item will appear in the Featured Works block on the front page.

Removing a Featured Item

Uncheck Featured on front page on the node edit form and save. The item will disappear from the front page after the next Solr index cycle.

Relevant File Locations

File	Purpose
tamu_theme/tamu_theme.theme	Promote checkbox hooks and submit handler
tamu_theme/css/cards.css	Masonry grid and card image styles
tamu_theme/templates/node/ds-1col--node-digital-object-with-thumbnail-for-grid.html.twig	Card HTML structure
tamu_theme/templates/views/views-view-unformatted--solr-search-collections.html.twig	Featured Collections masonry wrapper
tamu_theme/templates/views/views-view-unformatted--duplicate-of-collections.html.twig	Featured Works masonry wrapper
Archipelago metadata display: tamu_custom_simple_card_thumbnail	IIIF thumbnail URL builder (managed in Drupal UI)