Building a Programmers Blog: Blocks

Blocks are a fundamental part of the way that Drupal structures your site. Blocks are placed into regions around your main content to provide additional information and navigation.

The theme you select for your site (see next week) will declare a number of different block regions, into which you arrange blocks. To illustrate, Garland (the default theme that comes bundled with Drupal) declares these regions:

• Left sidebar (a column up the left of the page)
• Right sidebar (a column down the right of the page)
• Content (immediately below the content display)
• Header (above the site title and menus)
• Footer (below the content area)

Here are some starting ideas about how you can use blocks to structure your site.

User Login allows people browsing to your site to authenticate, typically by username and password and then post to your site. If you are setting up your site as a single user blog, then you might be tempted to remove this block. I'd suggest this is a bad idea, as you'll need to login yourself from time to time. I usually demote this block to somewhere out of the way, such as my site footer, so it's accessible when required but overlooked by most readers.

Navigation provides you with access to content creation and management features, along with full administration options. This block is normally only visible to authenticated users. I usually put this block somewhere easily accessed as I need to use it for navigating around very often.

Markdown Filter Tips might be useful if you enabled Markdown as an input filter as described in an eariler post. Of course, you don't want this showing all the time; you only want it to be visible when entering or updating a node. To achieve this, edit the configuration of the block as follows:

The first line (node/add/*) allows the block to be shown whenever you are adding a new node - be it a blog entry, page, story or something else. The second line (*/edit) works in a similar fashion to show the block whenever you are editing a node.

It's useful to note that this block is a simple example of Drupal's extensibility - when you activated the Markdown module, not only did it give you the Markdown input filter, it gave you this accessory block as well.

Recent Blog Posts does exactly what it says - it lists recent blog posts. It doesn't list pages or stories or any other node type, just blog posts. This can be useful for sites that only show stories on the front page, as it provides visibility of other activity on the site.

Primary Navigation is a menu block that lists the top level navigation items configured on your site. Normally your theme will expose primary navigation directly in some way - in Garland, these links show in a row at the top of the screen. There are sometimes reasons to include this block anyway - particularly if the theme doesn't expose any nested links. The Secondary Navigation block is similar.