That's also the original logic behind the component module:

http://drupal.org/project/component

That said, -1 to putting function calls directly in the template.  They're not
portable to other template engines other than PHPTemplate.  That's also
putting too much logic into a template, where it belongs in a theme/template
(preprocess) function.  

On Saturday 23 February 2008, David Metzler wrote:

Yep, I used something similar to this used to be possible in 4.7 and

I used it to create a region and put it in into a panel using Panels

so that I could still use block subscription and fole filtering logic

etc within a panel.

For some reason it quit working in 4.7 most likely because I was

causing some system internal that shouldn't have been done.

Love to see this supported.

On Feb 22, 2008, at 5:20 AM, Gábor Hojtsy wrote:

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 8:20 PM, Earl Miles <merlin@logrus.com> wrote:

Gábor Hojtsy wrote:

What do you think?

My one concern here is that because the block system is push, not

pull,

all blocks in all regions are always generated, regardless of

whether

the page needs them. That means we run the risk of degrading

performance

by generating a whole bunch of material that we have no intention of

displaying, unless we have some way for the theme to signal which

regions it wishes to generate on any given template. And that's a

tough

thing to do in the current system.

This is one of the reasons I like the panels approach, but that's

still

pretty far from being able to fully emulate the block system.

Completely understood. I always disliked that PHPTemplate builds all

block regions regardless of needs. I used to use lots of conditionals

around block region bulilding in my pure PHP themes (before migrating

over to PHPTemplate not long ago, due to its other advantages). So

after all, a possible explosion of blocks / regions would require some

(more) benchmarking and thinking about block performance. (Given that

I am working primarily on better support for WYSIWYG right now, this

is not my top priority unfortunately).

Gabor

--
Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42
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