I'm porting over the Panel Navigation for Bentley University into a Drupal Module. The navigation is currently visible on http://www.bentley.edu. One of the challenges was loading it in Drupal on every page load. The module uses a combination of hooks and adds a variable to _phptemplate_variables in the theme.

The one element that gave me the most problems was one of the easiest to solve. I kept trying to call drupal_add_js() and drupal_add_css() from within the function that renders the theme output. The HTML output would render fine but I could not see the JS/CSS anywhere. After digging around the forums it became apparent I needed to fire off the inclusion of the js and css at a different hook.

Initially I added the functions to hook_init(). Apparently this can cause problems as not all Drupal functions are available from the bootstrap process. On further reading the hook_menu function was recommended. This was very easy, and seems like a relatively clean way of doing things. Keep in mind this is all using D5. My understanding is D6 and D7 have more elegant solutions.

/** hook_menu implementation */
function mymodule_menu($may_cache) {
    if(!$may_cache) {
    _mymodule_init();
    }
}
 
/** js/css init function **/
function _mymodule_init() {
    $path = drupal_get_path('module','mymodule');
    drupal_add_js($path . '/js/jquery.someplugin.js');
    drupal_add_js($path . '/js/mymodule.js');
    drupal_add_css($path . '/css/mymodule.css');
}

I'm always on the lookout for better ways of doing things so this post may be updated. For the time being this was nice, quick and easy!