Sidebar is a bad name - it encourages the perpetuation of the stupid 3 column CMS paradigm, by making people think of block regions as "side
+1 on regions instead of "sidebars".
+1.
Drupal uses the 3 column paradigm. As such, 'sidebar' is a lot less confusing. How about calling it 'column' which seems to have a bit of
I still like region better. The downside of "column" is that we'd never be able to happily and semantically do "wide" columns, like a header or footer (what the hell is a "header column"?). Likewise, it's difficult to imagine a column within a column, or a sidebar within a sidebar, but quite easy to imagine a region within a region. "Sidebar" may be less confusing in the short run, but naming parts of Drupal solely per the paradigm (ie. renaming "taxonomy" "categories", which still bums me out) is bad. Remember: the greatest honor of a paradigm is to be broken.
I agree with Dries in that the naming should reflect the current behaviour not some envisoned future feature set. Now blocks can only be 'left' or 'right', ie. in sidebars. I even think that 'columns' is worse then 'sidebars', since 'columns' relate to tables, while 'sidebars' cite the meaning of what we are talking about. If a patch is done and accepted to allow true regions, then it is more than fine to rename 'sidebars' to 'regions'. But until then, sidebar is more than suffice. But then the column header of the blocks table should also be renamed 'sidebar' and not 'region'. Drupal developers were not afraid of providing new names for old stuff, just see the 'access control' menu in the 4.6RC, or how bundles where renamed to categories in 4.5. BTW I was also against renaming taxonomy to categories in the menu, just for the record, but that does not matter now :) Goba