[development] Making blocks from some setting in Drupal 7?

[Aaron Winborn]

I thought blocks were only generated if they needed to be based on its 
"Page specific visibility settings"? In that case, they would just need 
to be defaulted with specific <front> or whatever settings to emulate 
current behavior.

Earl Miles 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.
>