Andy Chase

It’s 2010, nearly two years after the release of Drupal 6, yet there are still sites out there using Drupal 5. (We can’t all always be on the bleeding edge.) As time goes on, troubleshooting obscure problems gets harder and harder as new versions of old modules are released and discussed… so for those of you fighting the good fight to support a Drupal 5 project, here’s how I fixed some weirdness that I experienced with Drupal 5 CCK fieldgroups.

The problem I was having was that some grouped fields weren’t being themed with the standard <fieldset> tag wrapper when viewing (not editing) the nodes they belonged to.

I spent some time digging through my custom code, wondering what I might have done at the theme layer or in a hook_form_alter() to cause this weird, inconsistent behavior. I couldn’t find anything.

In a final act of headscratchery, I went back to the CCK ‘Display Fields’ form, where you can customize how your fields and fieldgroups get formatted when a node gets rendered for display. Everything looked normal, but just for the hell of it I switched the styling setting from ‘fieldset’ to ‘simple’ - that worked just fine. I then switched it back to ‘fieldset’, and re-saved. Suddenly the expected fieldset formatting kicked in for those misbehaving fields; I’m assuming there is a cache somewhere that simply needed clearing, and resubmitting the ‘Display Fields’ form did the trick.