Drupal® For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8

Building Blocks and Managing Menus

In This Chapter

• Understanding regions, menus, and blocks
• Using regions
• Using blocks
• Creating and administering menus

Themes are customizable. A theme can be modified, for example, to put the primary menu on the left side of the web page rather than across the top. In this chapter, we extend the discussion of themes and take a closer look at how they can be manipulated from their default appearances. If you're a control freak, you're going to love this stuff.

We also discuss menus in more detail in this chapter — in particular, secondary menus and custom menus. (Chapter 5 covers primary menus.) Finally, we discuss creating a dynamic menu that changes when you post new content.

Understanding Blocks, Regions, and Menus

You need to understand three Drupal terms before diving in to this chapter:

• Region: A location on your web page. For example, the Header region is located at the top of all your site pages. It usually contains a logo and the title of your site.
• Block: A container that holds a chunk of code. Drupal organizes menus and other chunks of code into blocks. This makes them easier to move around as you redesign the look of your site.
• Menu: If you've spent any amount of time on the Internet, you probably have a pretty good idea of what a menu is: a set of links to web pages. In Drupal, that basically describes a menu — but those links can also point to nodes (a fancy word for Drupal content) such as articles and basic pages. ...