ELMS Botany: Using the Regions Module

Links Updated Nov 1, 2011 In this screencast I'll cover the newly created Regions API that I built while developing ELMS. There seemed to be a million different ways that people were handling the adding of bars in drupal. Some projects like Appbar provide a top nav with flexible CSS configuration but start to lose focus and get into things like notifications and functionality beyond framework. Many of the bars I found were doing this, either providing a very specific use-case or were clearly aiming to be more of a facebook-esk bar framework.

So, I knew that for ELMS interface I wanted to have 3 regions that lived outside the context of any one theme. Enter Regions API. Regions allows you to define a new region through a very simple hook_define_regions. This allows you to package chunks of functionality in Features (via Context) that are theme independent. An example of when you might want to do this is displaying a Feedback tab on a series of sites that don't share the same theme regions. In ELMS case, this is for defining a top, left and right area that blocks can be dropped into and function consistently. This will allow for Features that add relationship-based functionality (like the atrium feed reader integration seen here