By L2PNet on

OK, I've been trying to reorder the blocks in my Content area... I have a lot of blocks there. After a certain number (20), the order I saved it in reverts to alphabetical... Could I have too many blocks? Or is this another issue?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

mm167’s picture

mm167 commented

blocks come from drupal core modules and optional modules your have installed.

u will have more "blocks" as u install more optional modules.

but...u can "disable" those blocks u are not interested.
OR, even un-install the modules u are not interested.

u are the boss ....

L2PNet’s picture

L2PNet commented

Thanks for the help, but this isn't what I needed.

gforce301’s picture

gforce301 commented

Are you weighting the blocks and then they are going alphabetical order on you? If all blcoks have the same weight then they are alpha sorted. That means that any blocks that have the same weight will also be alpha sorted. Since the weight range only goes from -10 to +10 then most likely you have some blocks with the same weight and they will be alpha sorted.

L2PNet’s picture

L2PNet commented

Actually, I was drag-n-dropping... I just didn't want to mess with the weights manually when I had that option, but now I will look at the weights and be a bit more careful with them. Thank you very much!

L2PNet’s picture

L2PNet commented

I'm trying, but I don't see a "weight" option in my blocks... How do I do that?

glennr’s picture

glennr commented

Apologies if I've got the wrong idea here, but it sounds to me like you might be trying to load all the blocks into a region (in the Garland theme) confusingly called content. This isn't actually the main content area, it's a region positioned just below the main content area.

In any case, I'm not sure that loading over 20 blocks into a region is the best approach. You might want to consider these alternatives:

  • Add extra regions to your theme. I think this is the best approach for most sites. See the theme guide but if you're new to theming I recommend the Drupal 6 Themes book.
  • Choose another theme that has all the regions that you need. Newswire and Acquia Marina are good examples of themes with several regions.
  • Check out the Panels module. It could be ideal for a complex layout with a lot of content.
  • For finer control over how content is listed, check out Views and Nodequeue if you haven't already.
L2PNet’s picture

L2PNet commented

I'm already using a different theme, actually, and I know how to add more regions (that was going to be my last resort, in this case) but the points you've made are very helpful and I'll keep them in mind.

ywarnier’s picture

ywarnier commented

Just as a note, the block table in Drupal 6 has a "weight" column that is a tinyint, which means (as indicated in http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/numeric-types.html) that your are limited to a weight between -127 and +128, this generates an effective limit of 256 blocks for your whole site unless you decide to have several blocks of the same weight and let Drupal order them alphabetically (but that's probably a nightmare if you're trying to do that with 256 blocks).

Just increasing tinyint to smallint will give you a range of 65535 blocks weights.

Obviously, this is not recommended, but hey... you never know when you might need this to save you from a bad situation.

In Drupal 7, the "weight" column is an int, so somehow someone must have had the same problem.

--
Yannick Warnier
Project leader, Chamilo LMS
http://beeznest.wordpress.com/author/ywarnier
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deanflory’s picture

deanflory commented

I've experienced the same issue with both D6 and D7 when a bunch of modules are available. Once it gets to a certain number of available blocks, the reordering functionality appears to stop working. This is with Javascript on and off in a browser, using drag-n-drop or weights numbering. Argh, makes no sense this wasn't fixed in D7, even though someone mentioned the tinyint to int change. There has to be some other reason. I've tried it every way possible and I can't enable a block in a certain region by dragging it or setting the drop-down to the region. Any ideas?