How do you use a view with arguments as the site front page in Drupal?

I have a Drupal site and I have setup a view to power the front page.

My goal is to be able to pass 0-2 arguments to the home page, that get passed into the view. However, I still need the normal Drupal pages to work. The list of arguments is known.

For example:

• mysite.com/berlin/birds would pass in "berlin" as the first argument and "birds" as the second argument to the view that powers the front page.
• mysite.com/berlin would just pass in one argument, "berlin"
• mysite.com/admin would load the normal admin pages in Drupal

I'm not clear on how to achieve this. Is there a ho开发者_开发问答ok I can use? I can't find one or think of one. Is there a way to specify this in the argument for the view itself? Perhaps I can write a hook that interjects when the URL is being loaded, and rewrite in the background?

The solution I currently have is to add these paths (since my arguments are known) to the menu system. This works, except that when I the pages they aren't the front page, so the pages don't use the node themes I want (they use the node details theme).

I don't think you can really do this without custom code. The View needs a path before it starts taking arguments, and your URLs start with the arguments. What you can do is fake it with custom code. I've used something like this:

/**
 * Implements hook_init().
 */
function mymodule_custom_init() {

  $item = menu_get_item(); // Matching Drupal path

  if (!$item) { // There is no matching Drupal path.
    $_GET['q'] = 'view_path/' . $_GET['q']; // Fake path path.
  } // if

} // mymodule_custom_init

Then you give the view a path of "view_path" and it responds to everything that doesn't match anything else in Drupal's paths.

There is a spot in the views UI for "Argument handling code" that takes a small snippet of php - http://drupal.org/node/70145

You could run some code there that checks to see if you are on the front page (or arguments are not present or whatever)and insert the arguments you want.

Another way is to set arguments via a hook_views_pre_view or hook_views_pre_build. Is better because you are sure you don't break other stuff (like another view block).

function MYMODULE_views_pre_view(&$view){
    if ($view->name == 'your_view_name' && drupal_is_front_page()) {
        $view->set_arguments(array('you_argument','you_second_argument'));
    }
}