Block API

Blocks in Drupal 6 (and 5) always felt a little less loved than other portions of Drupal. While the node and theming APIs offered straightforward and often elegant methods to modify behaviour without modifying other peoples' code, blocks weren't so fortunate. Lacking API support, working with blocks often meant writing ugly code. Last week helping with the Drupal Block API documentation I discovered this has changed in Drupal 7. I thought I'd share what I learned.

The information I'll discuss is a summary of the block information from:

• Converting 6.x modules to 7.x (http://drupal.org/node/224333)
• Converting 6.x modules to 7.x - Categorical (http://drupal.org/node/394070)
• Block API Documentation: block.api.php
• Examples Module: block_examples.module (From: Examples for Developers project)