Steven Levin steven at tux dot appstate dot edu

Blocks are one of the most basic components of a web site. Blocks created by blockmaker are to be used for placing small amounts of content on your site. If the content is going to be longer than just a few sentences then consider making a pagemaster page. If you have decided a block is what you need then navigate to the administrative side of the Block Maker module. The Block Maker module can be found under the Site Content Tab of your Control Panel. The link for it says Block Maker and has an icon of a cursor hovering over a series of blocks. Click on the textual link or the icon to continue.

The first time you enter the Block Maker module you see a listing of all the blocks which are currently in the database. You can always return to this list from anywhere in the module by clicking the list blocks link at the top of the page. The listing of the blocks provides you with the ability to edit, delete, and activate/deactivate blocks. Clicking the edit button on the row of the block you wish to edit will take you form for modifying that block. Editing blocks is explained in section (4) of this document. Clicking the delete button on the row of the block you wish to delete will take you to a Yes/No confirmation. This confirmation makes sure you want to delete the block selected. Take this time to make sure you have selected the correct block and this is what you want to do. There is no recovery after you click Yes. Click No to cancel the deletion process. Clicking the Activate/Deactivate button on the row of the block you wish to change will toggle whether or not the block is publically viewable.

Creating a new block is quite easy. Just follow the directions below and you will be done before you know it. Click the Create A New Block link at the top of the page and that will take you to the form you need to fill out. If at anytime you wish to cancel what you are doing just click the Back to Main link at the top of the page. Next fill out all of the necessary fields. None of these fields: title, content, or footer are required but if you don't put any content in the block then the block will not show up. The title field is used as just that, a title. It also represents the block in the list of blocks mentioned in section (2) of this chapter. The content field is where most of your information will go. There is a small wysiwyg provided here for those with javascript enabled. The wysiwyg gives you the ability to easily add several different html tags into your content. The footer field is rarely used and must be supported by the boxstyle the block is using. This can just generally be ignored. The default theme variable is used for the placement of the block on your site. This is not set in stone and can be moved later via the layout module's box move. The choices in this dopbox explain exactly where on the site the block will defaulty be placed. The allow view option gives you the abilty to select which modules must be active in order for the block to appear. For instance you can select pagemaster and the block will only be visable when a pagemaster page is being viewed. Most of the time you will select all the modules so the block can always be seen. If none are selected and the block is saved then they will all be selected by default. When you are done click the Save Block button and you will be returned to the listing of blocks. Now you will need to activate the block in order to make it publically viewable.

Editing a block is much like creating a new block except all of the fields are pre-populated with the data that was entered when creating this block. If at anytime you wish to cancel what you are doing just click the Back to Main link at the top of the page. Now you can modify the content in the block and change its allow view options. The only thing you can't change here now is the theme variable you chose when creating a block. This has to now be modified by the layout module's box move. When you are done editing the block click the save block button and the block will be saved to the database and return you to the list of blocks. Make sure the changes you made are correct because they will go live as soon as you save the block. Unless you deactivate it before you begin to edit.