Drupal 6 Block Management

In Drupal 6, sidebar content (or content other than the page content) is managed through blocks. Depending on how many block regions you might have, you can have content in a number of different locations on your page throughout your site.

You’ll notice on this page that there is a sidebar, an image above the content about education and four orange buttons linking to other areas of the site. These are all contained in blocks. Even the drop down menu at the top is contained in a block.

This structure makes it easy to reconfigure your site in no time flat.

Every Drupal instance has blocks and managing them is a very simple process. This tutorial will guide you through some of the key features of Drupal 6 Block Management.

Blocks Overview

1. You’ll need to have your permissions set to manage the blocks and then go to the block management page (example.com/admin/build/block). If you are using a site set up by our company, your role will have to be set as administrator.
2. Bear in mind that you will see different layouts depending on what options are set in your theme. At the right, you can see a sample of what a full page would look like. Notice the yellow highlighted areas. Those are the regions that you can place content. You will only see these highlight areas on this page indicating where you can place your various blocks.
3. At the top of the page, you will notice a tab for listing blocks or adding blocks. I’ll show you how to add a block lower in the tutorial.
    
   Notice that it does provide some instruction on how to manage blocks.
4. As you scroll down the page, you will see the various regions and some have blocks in them for you already.
   
5. As you continue to scroll down, you will notice that there are blocks that are not assigned to any region at all.
   
   These blocks usually are set up for you automatically from modules that you have installed. When you create your own block, they will appear in this disabled section by default.

Adding Blocks

1. When you want to add blocks, simply click on the add block tab at the top of the page.
   
2. The primary fields that you will worry about are the Block Description (required), the block title and the block body.
   • Description: This is the field that will appear in the list of blocks. You can name this anything that you want. I like to make this as descriptive as possible.
   • Block Title: This is what the user will see as the block title. You can leave it blank and no one will see a title.
   • Block Body: This is where all your content for the block will be. You can add code or you can use the FCKEditor (assuming it is installed and configured)
3. If you would like to learn more about advanced configuration, go to the next tutorial. If you simply want the block available for everyone on every page, you can simply click save block at the the bottom of this page and then skip to the arranging blocks tutorial below.

Advanced Block Features

1. When you want the block to appear for only certain types of users or only on certain pages, you’ll need to do a little more editing on the block features. If You are not still in the block creation page, you can simple click on configure next to your block in the block list.
   
   Note that on some blocks you can see a delete option. This delete option is only available on blocks that you have added. System configured blocks can not be deleted from this view. These advanced features should be available on all blocks in your list.
2. The areas on the block configuration below the items in step two of Add Blocks above are your advanced settings. The first area of consideration is The user specific visibility settings. For a block that is important to my marketing efforts, I will never allow the user to turn this off. However, you might change this option on blocks such as online users.
    
3. The next section is for the role of the users. You can have a block of instructions depending on what their logged in status is. For example, you can create a block for the bloggers on your site linking them to the tutorials here so that they can learn how to blog on their own. Note… when you add the authenticated user role, everyone who is logged in will see it.
   
4. The last section, Page Specific Visibility Settings, is the section that we use the most. This allows for a block to appear only on certain pages. Perhaps you want a block on the home page but nowhere else. If you want a block only on blog pages but not on the other pages… then this is how you set it. There are some key strategies to make this easier that I will show you here.
   • First, you need to know what page you want the block to appear. For simplicity, I like to browse to that page in another tab on my browser. If I was going to look at this page that you are reading now, I would notice that the URL is
     http://www.tributemedia.com/education/tutorials/drupal_block_management
   • Now, I don’t want to worry about the domain name, I only care about that page, so I I will highlight the URL of the page without the domain name like this:
     
     I will then simply copy with my short cut key (Mac: command-c or Win: ctrl-c)
   • I will then paste (Mac: command-v or Win: ctrl-v) that URL into the pages section. I will make sure that I select whether or not I want it to appear on every page except the one listed or only on the page listed.
     
   • One thing that you can do to make this more efficient, assuming that you have some logic behind your URLs or paths, is to use a wildcard to select many pages at once. When we create your site, we automatically build some logic. The most common place to find this is in blogs (you can see our multi-user blog description here for more information on logical paths in blogs). So, if you want to have a block appear (or not appear) on all blog pages, you can use notation like this:
     
     Be aware that the wildcard can appear anywhere in the path so you can get creative on how you use this.
5. When you are complete with the settings, simply save the block.

Arranging blocks

1. When you are ready to make the block appear in a certain block region, you simply will need to go to the list view of your blocks (example.com/admin/build/block). Notice that the blocks you add will appear in the disabled section. They are not in any particular order, so you’ll just have to find the one you created.
2. You now have two options for arranging your blocks
   • Your first option is to drag and reorder them. You will notice that if you hover your mouse over the little plus symbol that you can reorder the blocks anywhere on the page:
     
   • Your second option is to pull down the menu in the region column. I will often use this if my block lists are a bit unwieldy and I at least want to get the block close before I start dragging and dropping.
     
3. Make sure that after you make your changes that you click “Save Blocks” at the bottom of the page.

A little note on blocks

Sometimes, depending on how your site is configured, you may find blocks that are displayed but don’t appear to be in any block region.

The most common time that this is true is when you have a custom home page layout that is different than your internal pages. In those cases, the content is stored in blocks but may be in the disabled category, if you can’t seem to find the right block to edit in those cases, make sure that you ask the developer that built your site to show you where that block is (or at least show you how to find it).

Sometimes, you just have to click configure on a few blocks until you find it. If you do have to hunt for it, make sure that you change the description to something better for future reference.