Custom Regions

Creating Custom Regions

All Drupal themes you download will come with a number of pre-defined regions into which you can already place blocks (normally header, left-sidebar, content, right-sidebar, footer), but it can sometimes be useful to create your own.

This can seem a little daunting at first, but it's really just a simple two-step process:

step 1 - define the custom region in your template.php file
step 2 - add the custom region to your page.tpl.php file

So, lets see how it works.

Step 1 - define the custom region in your template.php file

All themes should have a template.php file contained within the theme folder.

Open the template.php file in your chosen editor and locate the function titled 'function nameoftheme_regions' (where nameoftheme will be the name of the theme to which you are adding a custom region). This will probably be the first function in the file, and should look something like this:

function nameoftheme_regions() {
  return array(
       'header' => t('header'),
       'left' => t('left sidebar'),
       'content' => t('content'),
       'right' => t('right sidebar'),
       'footer' => t('footer')
  );
}

Okay, now just add your custom region so that it looks like the pre-defined regions.

Bookmark/Search this post with: