[development] Blocks and Regions rethink (concept needs feedback)

[Sam Tresler]

Barry Jaspan wrote:
> My (fairly simple, I think) desired improvement for Regions is to
> allow modules to declare them, e.g. hook_regions(), instead of just
> allowing the theme to declare them.  For example, I'd like to have a
> "Node Regions" module that lets me declare a region "floated left at
> the beginning of the third paragraph of a node's body field"; any
> block could then be added to the region.  I've actually already
> written the module but it requires manually editing the theme's
> template.php file.  It should not have to.
> 
> I should have submitted a hook_regions() patch for D6 but did not, so
> now I'm just trying to get my pet feature added to your rethink. :-)
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Barry

Barry,

Sorry to be a downer, but that is perhaps the one thing that I wouldn't 
want in something like this.  And I'm not certain why you would  want it 
in a module-form, so maybe there is something I'm missing about what you 
are saying here.

If we did anything like that it would need to generate CSS with it, and 
also need to be overridable.  I can't imagine us hitting upon a default 
region design that would be even close to universally useful to people - 
if one region is floated left in your node-content -despite the design 
its in- every time you enable a module, well, that would get annoying 
quick - to always need to overrie it to kill the module specific region.

Blocks are just content that can be themed, regions are very theme 
specific.  We need to keep a solid separation of data and design in this.

I guess what I'm proposing would be changing both the data stored 
(allowing blocks to be cloned and appear in multiple regions) and the 
input interface - but not really touching on any block's theme() calls.