noob question about node positioning and regions
I'm sure this is a stupid question, but I have searched extensively and failed to find a good answer.
I am trying to create a drupal website with multiple dynamic content areas on each page: one content area in the header that will display announcements, one central content area that will display the main content of the site, and a final content area that will display quotes of the week.
I have defined custom regions that correspond to the locations of the various content areas. I am now trying to identify an easy way to fill these regions with the actual content and an easy way to edit this content (i.e. I want to be able to go into the drupal admin page and simply type edits into three different text fields that correspond to the three different content areas).
It seems to me that the easiest way to accomplish this task would be to assign story nodes to each content region and then use the "body" text fields of the story nodes to edit the content in the various areas. I know how to assign blocks to regions, but I have not been able to figure out how to assign nodes to custom regions. If anybody knows how to do this or can suggest an alternate method of achieving my goals, please let me know.
Thanks very much and please forgive me for the stupid question!
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you can create stuff to put into regions with the views.module though regions by nature handle blocks. Thus you may have to use block views when creating your views.
Generally you put blocks in
Generally you put blocks in regions and content in blocks.
For the quotes part you might want to check out the Quotes module, for announcements there is the Announcements module.
In more general terms there is the views module which can be used to list content in a page or block.
Follow-up question
I'm working with the original poster on the site that he described, and I just want to clarify his question slightly. Just to warn you, noob does not even begin to describe my level of familiarity with Drupal, so please forgive my outrageous cluelessness. Anyway, our goal is to create a web page with the various content areas the OP specified. While assigning blocks to regions will suffice, the site is being designed for a teacher who does not want to use HTML or any coding language to make edits, so we would like it if he could just login to the admin page and make edits by just typing into text fields. From what I understand from the OP, editing the content of blocks is a multi-step process that requires HTML editing (or something similar).
So, my questions are:
1) Is there a way to achieve our desired effect without using blocks (assigning nodes to custom regions or using panels)?
OR
2) Is there a way to make it so that blocks can be edited in a very simple, single-step process that requires no coding knowledge?
Thanks so much, and please excuse my ignorance.
You could use panels, you
You could use panels, you can also have blocks display nodes.
Thanks for all the help,
Thanks for all the help, guys.
If I am not mistaken, information entered into the "body" field of a node is stored in the "$content" region variable. Is there anyway to edit a node so it stores body text in a different variable?
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one way would be to create a view, expose the body field to the view and display the view in a block.
Within page.tpl.php $content
Within page.tpl.php $content refers to the pages content, it might be a single node (more than just the body), a list of nodes and more.
Within node.tpl.php $content holds the displayed fields of a node.
The point being $content depends on context but in general terms holds generated content.
From your question this is where displaying a node in a block (or panel if using panels) comes in to play, they both provide ways of displaying content in something other than the main content area.
Search of blocks
In reading of the above -- which is the same problem I'm dealing with -- I found the Lesson Eight web video at Learnbythedrop.com that is helpful. It doesn't help, though, with cck or views. But, what I did learn from the Lesson is that blocks are not searchable. He also says that titles in blocks cannot be clicked through.
That's why I was also looking for a way to post a node without a block, to avoid those two drawbacks.
I am wondering, though, if what I've learned is accurate when using Views....