[development] Fixing themes and regions

[Dries Buytaert]

On 17 Aug 2006, at 21:41, Nedjo Rogers wrote:
> The region handling we introduced for 4.7 (and that I mostly wrote)  
> is a step forward but produced confusion and instability in multi- 
> theme sites. It's cumbersome to have to configure things like  
> enabled status separately for each theme. As a 4.7 workaround I  
> wrote a helper module, http://drupal.org/project/issues/blockregion.

The block regions feature was touted as a much needed improvement,  
and after many years, finally made it into Drupal 4.7.  That said, I  
haven't seen that many people take advantage of it.  This can mean  
(at least) three things:

   1. My perception of the world is wrong.  People are in fact  
heavily using block regions.

   2. Users asked for the wrong functionality, or developers  
delivered the wrong functionality (they didn't listen to the users).   
Maybe the users need something else: think panels.module or  
section.module, for example.  The panel and section module appear to  
be fairly popular; maybe we need to pull in some more ideas from  
them, maybe we should adopt common terminology or interface elements.

   3. The block region feature does match people's expectations/need  
but is simply too hard to use.  This could be due to a number of  
things: (i) poor UI design, (ii) poor documentation, (iii) lack of  
examples, etc.


I think it is a combination of (2) and (3): sweeping changes are  
required to bring block regions onto the map.  Neil's suggestions  
would make for interesting starting points, IMO.

--
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/