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

[Gábor Hojtsy]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 8:20 PM, Earl Miles <merlin at 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