Block Party Suite

Installs: 
133
Open Bugs: 
3
Development Status: 
Seeking co-maintainer(s)
Under active development

Warning: This project is in early alpha. No plans for a Drupal 6 version.

Block Party is an aggregation of block module tweaks.

  • Admin designates if block visibility is controlled by block module or context module.
  • Show Only One Allow blocks to be configured to "show only one" block instance per region. When a block provider module (block, menu, etc.) for a given region is configured to "Show Only One", only one block of that type will appear in that region. This is handy when you have cascading menus or sidebars that you want to replace one another; but you don't want authors to have to tweak visibility through the block or contexts interface.
  • Allow block headers to be tagged as h3. This adds an attribute to blocks that theme templates can use to determine if h3 is suggested.
  • Allow block headers to be tagged invisible. This is done with a css class "element-invisible" which allows the headers to be accessible without them being visible.
  • Allow "field blocks." Field blocks are fields on a node which are configured to appear as a block in a particular region. The field is edited on the the node form, but appears as a block. The primary advantage to this is to avoid many single page blocks clogging the block system and coupling the location of the block with its sister node.
  • Allow authors to add classes to blocks
  • Add negate (!) symbol to block page visibility expressions
  • (not implemented yet) Support exportables/features for blocks

It has overlap with several modules. The purpose of it is to consolidate functionality to improve admin and author usability. If you are going to get fancy with your blocks, consider a module such as bean or a node as block module; they give you more flexibility with fieldable entities.

Architecture

Block Party is structured around the premise that in the absence of a block load alter hook, additional block attributes need to be stored in the block table. This allows the Select * in the block_load() function to get them into the block std class object where they are needed before the theming layer. It also avoids redundant block table queries.

Releases: 
7.x-1.x-dev
Release Dates: 
09/30/2013