Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting

Blocks

• Commonly used blocks include the following:
• Navigation menus (created in Administer, Site building, Menus)
• Lists of content (Views module; see Chapter 2)
• Login forms (Drupal core; turned on by default)
• Site categories (Drupal’s Taxonomy module)
• Recent comments (Drupal’s Comment module)
• Search (Drupal’s search module)
• Author information (Drupal’s profile module)
• Five-star ratings (http://drupal.org/project/fivestar)
• Facebook, Digg, and social bookmarking links (http://drupal.org/project/service_links)
• Similar entries (http://drupal.org/project/similar)

You can also create custom blocks with text, images, and even your own snippets of PHP code. Sample PHP snippets are available from the Drupal Web site at http://drupal.org/node/21867. To create a custom block, follow these steps:

Navigate to to Administer, Site Building, Modules and enable the PHP Filter module. You may also need to adjust the permissions for this input format by navigating to Administer, Site configuration, Input formats and clicking on the "configure" link next to PHP filter.

1. Navigate to Administer, Site building, Blocks.
2. Select the tab "Add block."
3. Add a "Block description." This description specifies how the block will be identified in the administration area and is a required field.
4. Add a "Block title" if you would like a title to appear at the top of the displayed block. This field is optional.
5. Put your text, images, and PHP snippet into the "Block body." You could also use plain text or HTML markup here if it was appropriate for your block.
6. Update the "Input format" to PHP.
7. Adjust the visibility settings for the "User," "Role," and "Page" roles.
8. Scroll to the bottom of the Web page and click "Save."

PHP snippets in blocks - Blocks with custom PHP snippets could break the display of your site if they contain errors. Be sure to carefully test your snippets before placing them into a block. Place your PHP snippet into the body of a private page to confirm that it will not break your site before deploying the snippet as a block.

Sites will sometimes have more screen real estate dedicated to blocks than to the main content on each page, especially when the blocks provide additional information for the node that is displayed on the page, such as author profile information or related content. Don’t be shy! Enable the most appropriate blocks for each part of your Web site. Blocks are included in Drupal’s caching system and will not harm the overall performance of your site. To enable caching for blocks, navigate to Administer, Site configuration, Performance. Under the section "Block cache," choose "Enabled." Scroll to the bottom of the Web page and click "Save configuration."

Customizing the Markup of Blocks

    <div id="block-<?php print $block->module .'-'. $block->delta; ?>"
      class="block block-<?php print $block->module ?>">
    <?php if ($block->subject) { ?>
      <h2><?php print $block->subject; ?></h2>
    <?php } ?>
    
      <div class="content">
        <?php print $block->content ?>
      </div>
  

For blocks provided by Drupal core, the variable $block- >delta represents the order in which this block was created. For example, the first block has a delta value of 1, the second has a delta value of 2, and so on. In rendered HTML, the first line would look like this:

  <div id="block-user-1" class="block block-user">

As you can see, the output is not nearly as complicated as the variables would suggest! Check the output to see what your module is using for its delta value. Some modules provide a text delta instead of a numeric delta.

A full list of block template variables is available from the default block template. This file can be found in your Drupal system files: modules/system/block.tpl.php. A full list of the variables is also available online at http://api.drupal.org/api/file/modules/system/ block.tpl.php.

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