Think of "Blocks" as pieces of content that one can create and assign to certain regions of the website, as well as to only show in certain sections of the website. A "Block" could be a menu, a chunk of HTML, or other pieces of content. A region of the website could be "the left column", or "the footer", or "content top", which would be the top of main body content. A section of the website could be something like "blog", or just the "products" area, or simply the "home page".
To create and manage "Blocks", please follow the steps below:
- Go to Administer -> Site Building -> Blocks
- You will be defaulted to the block "List" tab, and should immediately notice chunks of yellow areas around the page. These areas of yellow describe the available "regions" where you can assign and order blocks.
- All available blocks will be listed, including blocks that have not been assigned to any region; the "Disabled" ones.
- To add a block, click the "Add Block" tab.
- Enter a unique, yet descriptive "Block description" which will be displayed on the block isting page.
- Optionally, enter a "Block title" which will be displayed to the user above the "Block content". Sometimes useful, sometimes not so much.
- The "Block body" is the custom content you want the block to contain. Follow the steps as you would for creating a Page, but note that a block is usually displayed in a space-limited region of the website. So don't put a 600x600 pixel image into the block body, if the block is going to live in a column that's only 200 pixels wide, for example.
- In most cases you can ignore the "User specific visibility settings" section.
- If you want only anonymous or authenticated users to see the block of content you can optionally check those checkboxs in the "Role specific visibility settings" section. Otherwise you can ignore this section.
- The "Page specific visibility settings" section, allows you define if the block of content is displayed in only a specific area of the website. If you want the block to appear throughout the whole website, leave this section unchanged. If, for example, you want the block to show up only in the "contact" section of the website you would check the "Show on only the listed pages" radio button and then specify the following in the "Pages" text area:
contact
contact/* - The click "Save block" to save it.
- Once you've saved / configured your block, it will show up in the "Disabled" area unless it's already been assigned to a region.
- To assign it to a region, simply select that region from the select list
- Then click the "Save blocks" button at the bottom of the page.
- To remove a block from a region, just select the "<none>" option from the select list and click the "Save blocks" button at the bottom of the page.