How To Create An Announcement / Newsflash Block

We needed to have a newsflash announcement at the top of certain pages on a site. Here is a quick way of doing this with minimal theme code.

In order to do this, we decided to use the new "regions" feature for Drupal 4.7 blocks.

To do this, edit the template.php file in your theme directory. Add the following hook to it:

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

Then, in page.tpl.php, add this snippet above the breadcrumbs (or anywhere else you want).

<?php if ($content_top) : ?>
 <div align="center"><?php print $content_top ?></div>
<?php endif; ?> 

You now have a region called 'content top' in the administer -> blocks page. In it you can put any text you want, and restrict visibility to certain areas of the site using the standard waya of doing so for blocks.

One can get more creative and write a custom module that would publish blocks on certain dates, and such ...