Adding a New Drupal Block Position

We’re going to be adding a block position to a Drupal 6 theme called ShallowGrunge: http://drupal.org/project/shallowgrunge

The Goal

One of our students wanted to put a block position inside the red header bar. If you haven’t done so already, download and install ShallowGrunge: http://drupal.org/project/shallowgrunge

The Current Blocks

Currently there is only a “content” and a “right sidebar” region.

Finding Where to Insert

I’m using the WebDeveloper toolbar for Firefox to help me identify the red header bar’s area. I click on CSS >> View Style Information and then click on the area. The toolbar tells me that the area is called #menu

Opening the Files

In your site files, navigate to sites / all / themes / shallowgrunge / shallowgrunge.info and open that file

Add the Region Name

This file contains all the information Drupal needs to know about the theme. Now we’re going to tell it about our new region. Currently only two regions are defined in this file. You’ll need to add another using this line: regions[header] = Header

Open page.tpl.php

The file that controls the layout of our theme is page.tpl.php so let’s open that up.

Add the Region Code

We scroll down in the file until we find the div called “menu” and we can insert our block code into there. The syntax is: {codecitation}{/codecitation}

Check Your New Region

Check back in Administer >> Site building >> Blocks and your new “header” region should show.

{loadposition drupalnewsletter}

Author

Robbie Adair

Robbie started her career in corporate training until starting her own custom training and media company almost seventeen years ago. In 2010, she began doing classroom training for OSTraining while running Media A-Team. She is often presenting about various tech topics such as Joomla, Fabrik, Web Development, Social Media, and Augmented Reality. She loves seeing that "ah-ha" moment in peoples eyes in her sessions and workshops. She lives in Houston, Texas, but enjoys all the travel for client work and speaking gigs.
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Hey Jason, that is a very old class (2013) for Drupal 7. Here's the link: https://ostraining.com/courses/how-to-use-the-rules-module-in-drupal/ sorry about that.

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Colin Mctavish

14 years ago

Hi,

Thanks for the tutorial. Is it possible to make a region a designated size over an image in the header? I would like to place a language switcher in my header of to the side while sharing it with a header image.

Is this possible?

Thanks

Mohammad

13 years ago

Colin, i Think yes but u need some CSS effect .

Just what i needed… thanks