An 8-Year-Old Drupal Core Issue That the Community Needs Help to Solve

Themes improperly check renderable arrays when determining visibility

Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash

One of the many great advantages of being a part of an open source project is that there are so many smart people out there are willing to contribute their time for the betterment of the project. This ability to crowdsource bugs and feature requests that rarely stumps the community is what makes Drupal such a powerful application.

While rare, sometimes the community finds a bug that is very difficult to solve. Let me introduce you to [#953034] Themes improperly check renderable arrays when determining visibility.

[meta] Themes improperly check renderable arrays when determining visibility

I was first introduced to this bug while trying to add a view block in the left sidebar. When the view was empty I expected the block and the sidebar to not be displayed. As you can see below, while the block was empty the sidebar was still being rendered.

The sidebar is Still being displayed.

I then googled and stumbled upon another issued, Empty view causes region to be displayed and it was exactly what I was looking for, but I noticed it was marked as a duplicate issue and linked to [#953034] Themes improperly check renderable arrays when determining visibility. This bug was reported to Drupal 7 core on October 26, 2010. The issue has over 310 comments and 230 followers.

You can really tell the severity and complexity of an issue when you see some of the brightest Drupal contributors have been making suggestions and striking out. They include but are not limited to:
bleen, chx, Cottser, Crell, DamienMcKenna, EclipseGc, Fabianx, Jeff Burnz, jenlampton, joachim, joelpittet, JohnAlbin, lauriii, markcarver, mdrummond, moshe weitzman, mpotter, samuel.mortenson, tim.plunkett, webchick, Wim Leers, xjm.

While I am not a backend developer, I felt like I could still help by highlighting a major issue that maybe someone either inside or outside the community could help find a solution.

Please remember to read the complete issue before commenting as so many people have suggested solutions to fix but have ran into a roadblock.

[meta] Themes improperly check renderable arrays when determining visibility

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