This is really a very nice idea and I can see that this is solving a lot of convenince issues. However, you still need to have access to the backend and do some coding which is still cumbersome in certain situations, e.g. when you are on a multisite setup where you can't edit theme files as that would be affecting all sites hosted as well.

This is why I suggest the following step forward: Couldn't you easily offer some textareas in the UI where people with the right permission could write their PHP code directly into the interface? "Handy Block" would store them in variables and load them as the right hooks during runtime - instead of loading them from files they would be loaded from variables. In the end, the whole rest of the functionality would remain the same.

Are you interested? I could imagine to write a patch for this to properly work.

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Jaza’s picture

Jaza commented

@jurgenhaas: sorry, but building a UI for Handy Block (and/or having Handy Block store anything in the database) goes against the core principles of the module. See my blog post for more background.

However, I do share your concern that the module currently doesn't allow blocks to be shared between different themes, or between different sites in a multi-site setup that use different themes. That's why I'm thinking of allowing blocks to be defined in a regular module callback, as well as the way they can currently be defined via a callback function in the active theme's template.php file.