Assign regions to specific themed areas: page, node, comment, etc.

Well, on second thought, it looks like regions in nodes could be done at present with no PHPTemplate changes. I'm going to call this a support request until we see if this approach works.

Steps:

1. Define the regions you want in a template.php file, including some that will be used in nodes:

function mytheme_regions() {
  return array(
    'right' => t('right sidebar'),
    'content' => t('content'),
    'header' => t('header'),
    'footer' => t('footer')
    'inline1' => t('inline 1'),
    'inline2' => t('inline 2'),
  );
}

2. Load regions in a _variables hook.

In the same template.php file, load regions into nodes:

function mytheme_variables($hook, $vars) {
  $variables = array();
  if ($hook == 'node') {
    // Load region content assigned via blocks.
    foreach (array('inline1', 'inline2') as $region) {
      $variables[$region] = theme('blocks', $region);
    }
  }
  return $variables;
}

3. Output the regions in node.tpl.php (or individual node type templates) just as you would in page.tpl.php:

print $inline1;

These regions will still be loaded as variables in page calls, but won't be output if there is no code to output them in page.tpl.php.

Anyone want to give this a try and report back? (Note that the same approach should be applicable to assigning regions to any other page area that's the subject of a theme call.)

This approach indeed works and we can indeed assign regions to any PHPTemplate template. I've updated the handbook documentation to give detailed instructions, http://drupal.org/node/29139. Use this rather than my draft code above, which had at least two errors ;)

I'd like to return to the approach I first suggested, of including template references in the _regions hook array. That might still be a useful enhancement. We would alter the

  elseif ($hook == 'page') {

section in _phptemplate_default_variables() to load blocks just for the called template (if it had any assigned regions). This small tweak would remove the need for custom _phptemplate_variables() handling, avoid unnecessarily loading all regions on page call (if some were for other templates), and also allow us UI cues to users as to where their regions will appear, e.g., in block configuration, tag regions with 'page', or 'node' (or 'content') as cues.