The Problem

Today I ran across an issue when trying to format out some Views that were integrated with Organic Groups. I needed to format out a few things, and the one I will speak on and demonstrate here is pulling out the member count in an Organic Group. By default, when you pull that data out in a view, it creates a link to the default OG page for members inside a group. The default path for that page is: og/users/$nid/faces. I find that link horrible, ugly, and just pure nasty in a nutshell. I really don't want anything in a client facing path that references a module name or abbreviation in the path. Of course, you could use a custom path to overwrite those path(s), but that's only if you really want to also use the default view that OG provides for members.

In the project I'm working on, these links that I'm modifying point to a custom panels page with multiple views inserted that relate to the members of the group. This gives me a flexible usage so that any time the member count of the group is pulled & displayed using views, that it will render the way I want, and link where I want the user to go.

In that handler function provided by OG it's also only wrapping a link around the numeric value of the member count, but what I need is more text available to that linking the full text like 24 members.

The project I'm working on has some unique requirements in the wireframes & designs related to the groups, and so some custom work was needed. This walkthrough will show a setup in a custom module that overwrites the default field handler that views uses to render that field.