Drupal® 7 Bible

Chapter 7. Working with Blocks

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding blocks

• Overview of the Blocks Manager

• Reviewing default blocks

Drupal blocks are units of self-contained functionality or content that you assign to specific physical regions of your Web site's layout. Most blocks are implemented by various core or contributed modules, but you also can use the admin tools or tools provided by contributed modules such as Views to create your own specialized blocks.

In this chapter, I introduce the fundamental concepts and behaviors of blocks, discuss how you position and customize them, and review the default set of blocks that you find in a standard Drupal install.

Understanding Blocks

Drupal blocks are components of functionality or content that the system renders during each page request. You can literally think of them as the building blocks of a Drupal Web page. Each block is assigned to a specific region of the page, with regions in turn defined by your Drupal themes. When managing blocks, you can optionally configure the behavior of each block—for example, by showing the block only to certain user roles or on certain sections of your Web site.

Note

Each active Drupal block is assigned to a region in the page. Regions are defined by each Drupal theme's presentation structure. Consequently, the number, placement, and naming of regions varies between themes, and following from this, you assign blocks to regions on a theme-by-theme basis.

Note

You can use contributed modules such as the Context ...