How To: Embed a Region in a Node | Innovating Tomorrow

By default, drupal provides a number of regions to put blocks in and lets you put them pretty much anywhere in the page you want to. But, there are a few exceptions to this rule. What if you want to put a region in a node? What if you want to put a region in between a node and the comments on that node? This may not seem so easy out of the box. Let's take a look at how to put a region in a node.tpl.php file.

Let's walk through a situation where I want to put a custom region between a node and it's comments. I could use this to place something like a block from the Similar by Terms module right under my posting.

I'll start by adding a custom region called node_region using hook_regions() in my themes template.php file.

You'll notice that I defined the same regions that come by default as well as the new node_region. This function defines all the regions, not just additional ones. In this case, I defined the same ones that come by default and just added my additional region.

This now created the node_region so you can assign blocks to in on your blocks admin screen.

Next we need to make the variable $node_region accessible in the node.tpl.php file. To do this we use the function _phptemplate_variables.

This will made $node_region available in node.tpl.php files. This same concept applies for comments and most of those other non-intuitive places you may want to put a block where it isn't obvious how.

Note: This works for drupal 5. Implementing this is slightly different in drupal 6.