I am quite sure there are still some of us out there who still do not understand what it means by blocks.However Drupal CMS allows you to place some and or certain contents of your Drupal website into the so called "Drupal Blocks".Blocks are simply boxes of content that you can place or put in certain regions of your site's pages.These blocks are always managed from the admin section under "Site Building".By defualt,Drupal CMS comes with preinstalled blocks which can be edited to meet your websites requirements or you can create new ones as the need arises.Some of the modules will automatically create blocks and get them listed in the blocks sections but you will need to configure and set their appearances as and when required.You will need to set up your Drupal installed themes to show which blocks should appear where on the site and also you can change the settings to either show a particular block or blocks or demote them from the theme.

You can either set your blocks to appear on the left side bar,right side bar,bottom and the header or within the content of your site.You can specify each region the block belongs to by using the first drop-down box that appears after the block name.You will also need to set up the weight of the blocks to determine which block appears first from top to bottom and if you do not want to publish any of your blocks until a later time,then you simply set it to none and the block will remain unpublished from any of the regions.A block that is not default which means one created by you and not through another module will also show or provide a link that you can use to delete it when ever the need is burning.However until you click the save botton,your block is not save which means what you were creating will go missing.

CONFIGURATION OF DRUPAL BLOCKS

Drupal Block specific settings

Under blocks specific settings section, you can change,edit and or over-ride the default block title as and when required. Sometimes you might not want to have the title of your block displayed,then simply select <none> from the drop down menu relating to the particular block in question.

Drupal User specific visibility settings

This section controls the visibility of your block by deciding who can access,edit and administer what and while at the same time you can allow your sites users to either hide or show a block depending on each prsons permissions.Permissions are always assigned by the sites administrator giving members rights and access.

Drupal Role Specific visibility settings

As mentioned earlier above,roles visibility settings allows site administrator to specify which user role can see a particular block,edit or publish infact who sees what what and who does not see what,all depending on the type of site and membership relating to your Drupal website.Some nodes can be set to allow all roles to see this block simply by allowing the user role blank and every person irrespective of registered or guest will be able to see it.This sis pretty straight forward and very easy to understand 

Drupal Page <node> specific visibility settings

Under this last section, the administrator can restrict which nodes that a block will show up. There are radio buttons to determine if your list of nodes are the nodes the block will displayed on or not diaplay on. You will need to put your list of pages in the text area below the pair of radio buttons that Drupal provides. Drupal CMS is so powerful that,it uses wildcard <'*'> to determin what should not appear on any node using the box provided for that purpose. With this section,you specify whole section rather than just individual pages.This allows you to specify whole section instead of just individual pages.

Add or Creat a Block

Drupal CMS allows you to create blocks on the fly while creating content if you decided to do so or for you to go to the blocks section and create blocks according to your needs. This section is straight forward but you will need to Click on the Save block button to add this new block to the list. Will continue to morrow with this free tutorial.

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