Links in $links not showing

Hi Dave,

thanks for your reply. Yes, it's definitely no theme related issue, if those links should be visible in D6 without modifying the theme.

I double checked this on several sites (as mentioned, I haven't seen those links on any of my D6 sites) with 'Garland', 'Pushbutton', and 'Marvin'. In Garland, the terms from the vocabulary occur doubled at the bottom at the node, but no 'Mollom' links are visible, neither in teaser nor full node view. Of course I did a 'flush all caches' (in 'admin_menu' between switching the default theme.

However, I accidentaly found a way to display Mollom's 'Spam' link by using a theme generated by Artisteer. I don't know enough about PHP, but the Artisteer people seem to manipulate and/or build their "links" section from the $links array (is this an array?) somehow manually:

Snippet from Artisteer's node.tpl.php:

<?php ob_start(); ?>
<?php if (is_art_links_set($node->links) || !empty($terms)):
$output = art_node_worker($node);
if (!empty($output)):   ?>
<div class="art-PostFooterIcons art-metadata-icons">
<?php echo $output; ?>

I'm not sure where these functions come from (template.php includes other PHP files like an drupal6_methods.php). However, as I suspected, they seem to have needed a helper function to extract the links from $links.

Looking at the links section in the Artisteer theme I made another stunning discovery: There are several other links (like node access statistics (probably from Drupal core's 'statistics.module'), a "post a comment" link (probably from Drupal core's 'comment.module'), and links to various flags (provided by the contributed 'flags' module). I wasn't aware that Drupal 6 did still have those because I haven't seen them since anymore since the D5 days.

Once more I checked all of my (currently active) 14 D6 sites, and those 'mollom', 'comment', 'flag', or statistics links are visible not on a single one of these sites - well, with one exception (a site running the 'Acquia Slate' theme). Those sites are running on different operating systems (Debian GNU/Linux, FreeBSD), on different webservers (Apache2, Lighttpd), with different sets of contributed modules and totally different themes. I have no idea what the common denominator might be, but this is pretty sure not an issue limited to Mollom.

I'm not sure how to continue from here, is this a "won't fix"?

I'll continue investigating my problem. Thank you for any suggestions & greetings,
-asb

Moving this issue to core as it occurs a) with core themes like Garland, and b) on different sites, with different environments (different in regard to age of installation, set of enabled modules, version of PHP, etc.).

Description in short: Drupal used to display various types of links in the $links section of a node; this includes, for example, node access statistics (from Drupal core's statistics.module), "Add comment" (from Drupal core's comment.module), "Read more", "Contact author" (from contributed "Contact link" module), several administrative links (from contributed "Admin links" module"), links to several image derivates (from contributed "Image" module). After upgrading from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, none of these links appear in $links anymore. This applies to different themes, and happens on several sites with separate code bases. Acces permissions are set properly for different roles, and the links do not show up for user #1.

Whatever theme is being used, printing $links in a template file like node.tpl.php displays none of the links mentioned above; overrides in template.php are not used. Switching back to the "Garland" core theme does not bring those links back. Also, disabling all contributed modules does not bring those links back, either. I'm currently experiencing this on 9 (nine!) different sites, including upgraded sites from D4.x/D5.x to D6, and fresh D6 installations. I tried themes like "Garland", "Pushbutton", "Minelli", "Slash", "Zen", "Fusion" and a couple of others.

Whatever might be causing this, Drupal core should take care that at least unaltered core themes do work properly (meaning: display $links as numerous core and contributed modules expect).

Possibly related issues:

• #679562: Links in $links not showing (Mollom)
• #674812: Add "Add comment" settings (Read more link)
• #338278: Contact link not showing (Contact link)
• #510658: No links (Admin links)
• No $links in D6 anymore? - Forums/Post installation

I agree, at least to some degree; it probably is something that deeply interacts with Drupal core.

Starting from my one site where the $links stuff is still visible, I spent the better part of this day to analyze this issue.

Basically I took the set of core/contributed modules I'm using on the unaffected site and set up a fresh sandbox with them. Then I added the remaining modules from the affected sites one by one, "hoping" that after enabling an additional module the $links stuff would disappear.

And indeed the red lights went on after enabling Synonym Collapsing ("This module allows site administrators to easily collapse several similar (synonymous) terms into one super-term, as to avoid duplicate terms..."), a very helpful module and part of my basic toolset since 2008.

Enabling Synonym collapsing works like a switch; with the module enabled, the complete $links stuff is being replaced by taxonomy terms. After disabling the module, the Commenting, Stats, Flags and Mollom links re-appear. This happens absolutely independent from the active theme and can be easily reproduced with Garland, Pushbutton, or sub themes of Zen or Fusion.

Also, there is already a related issue for this: #297759: Erases book links. This seems to be fixed in the last dev release 6.x-1.x-dev from 2008-Jun-23. I went through all my affected sites, and I could get the whole contents of the $links array back on all sites by upgrading to this dev version.

So the "stable" release of Synonym collapsing is badly broken and shouldn't be promoted anymore, and a new stable release is required.

Again changing the issue queue.

Greetings, -asb

Any updates?