Drupal – Add Previous and Next Links for Node Navigation

When you are viewing a node, it would be nice to have the previous and next navigation buttons so that you can browse other nodes of the same content type more easily. This is exactly the recent task i need to complete. Luckily i found a very good post showing how to add the navigation buttons in just 2 steps.

1. Add the following function in your theme template.php

function <theme>_prev_next($current_node = NULL, $op = 'p') {
  // Node types to include in paging
  $node_types = array('blog');

  if ($op == 'p') {
    $sql_op = '<';
    $order = 'DESC';
  }
  elseif ($op == 'n') {
    $sql_op = '>';
    $order = 'ASC';
  }
  else {
    return NULL;
  }

  $output = NULL;
  foreach($node_types as $type) {
    $quoted_types[] = "'" . $type . "'";
  }
  $sql = "SELECT nid, title, created FROM {node} n
    WHERE created $sql_op %s
    AND type IN (" . implode(',', $quoted_types) . ")
    AND status = 1
    ORDER BY created $order
    LIMIT 1";
  $result = db_query($sql, $current_node->created, $type);
  $data = db_fetch_object($result);
  if (!isset($data->nid) || !$data->nid) {
    return NULL;
  }
  return l($data->title, "node/$data->nid", array('html' => TRUE));
}

2. Add the following piece of code to node.tpl.php or node-<content-type>.tpl.php

<!-- Node paging start. Add this to your node.tpl.php and/or node-TYPE.tpl.php -->
<?php if (!$teaser) : ?>
  <div class="navpn">
    <div class="pnlaquo">&laquo;</div>
    <div id="pnprev"> <?php print <theme>_prev_next($node, 'p'); ?> </div>
    <div id="pnmain"> | <a href="<?php print base_path(); ?>">Home</a> | </div>
    <div id="pnnext"> <?php print <theme>_prev_next($node, 'n'); ?> </div>
    <div class="pnraquo">&raquo;</div>
  </div>
<?php endif; ?>
<!-- Node paging end -->

The navigation buttons should work now. Wait… i am using Panels for my node view which contains some Views content panes. How could i load the navigation buttons in views?

That’s easy, in your view, probably you will take the node id as argument to show the content of a specific node and the second argument of the URL will be the node id. Let’s change the code above as follow and paste it in the view template file.

<?php $blog= node_load(arg(1)); ?>
<div class="navpn">
  <div id="pnprev"> <?php print <theme>_prev_next($blog, 'p'); ?> </div>
  <div id="pnmain"> | <a href="<?php print base_path(); ?>">Home</a> | </div>
  <div id="pnnext"> <?php print <theme>_prev_next($blog, 'n'); ?> </div>
</div>

Rescan the template file and the navigation buttons are ready.

Done =)

Reference:

• creating a simple previous and next navigation for node pages
• Simple previous / next navigation by node title