Time for a "What if"

What if we used blocks to display pretty much everything.

Just throwing this out.  Some thought has gone into this, but 
nothing thorough and no testing.

What if we used blocks for:

header and footer - We could easily have section specific headers.  
While this isn't a complete separate skin, it's what is needed for 
many uses.

topicbar - Since this doesn't change often a block cache would keep 
from querying the db.  And if you don't use the topicbar, the class 
wouldn't be loaded at all.  However some skins don't really 
have a place for it so we'd have to work around this.

navbar - We already have this.  We could use the block to display the 
top and bottom navbars also.

modules - If module output was diplayed with a block we could add 
different titles easily or outline with a box for all module output, 
rather than having to change each module's templates.  For stories we 
could move the location and number of stories on a page easily.

The index page only has to call the block object to get all data 
needed.  We might even be able to make use of a page type block.

We might also be able to use something like a template block type.  
It's only task would be to parse the named template into a block.

Most of this can be done with minimal changes.  The index templates 
need a {TOP} and {BOTTOM} and the blocks assigned to these columns.

The Block_render classes should be pretty simple.

Just realized a downside.  When you add new sections, they wouldn't 
have all the page components automatically.

Joe


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