Getting going on regions for 4.7

As many Drupal developers will know, Drupal 4.7 will include support for multiple regions into which blocks and other content can be rendered.

Multiple regions opens up a lot of space for creativity--but we'll need to get going if we're going to take advantage of the possibilities. So far (judging by what's in contrib), we haven't begun to scratch the surface. Everyone who maintains or contributes to a theme should look at what they can be doing with regions.

This handbook page introduces regions in themes, and links to specific pages on upgrading themes and working with regions in plain and phptemplate themes.

Khalid also gave a useful tutorial on how to create and customize additional regions.

I'm hoping we can do two things with 4.7 themes:

1. Improve the display of existing regions. Phptemplate includes 5 regions by default: left, right, content, header, and footer. As things stand, these will all look like the existing left and right regions--which often won't work, e.g., because they're too wide. Theme designers will want to customize the look of these regions. Khalid's tutorial is a good start here.

2. Create and customize additional regions. The five regions implemented in phptemplate are only a start--and, of course, plain PHP themes don't even have these. Again, look at Khalid's tutorial to see how easy it is to add new regions, anywhere on the page.

Need help getting going? Have suggestions for others? Please post here any questions, comments, or suggestions you have about how to implement regioning.