Anonymous's sandbox: Block region injector

This module swaps out the page rendering layer, and caches the blocks, allowing them to be exposed to templates other than the page template. Using this module you are able to set up more complex regions for your theme, such as regions within the node template. This will allow you to output both fields and blocks within the subject of a page (even blocks within fields) to create a more dynamic front-end than Drupal allows out of the box.

This helps developers that are working to front-end designs and templates that have a more complex layout than the encapsulated way that Drupal wants to work. The most common example of which is perhaps wanting to display your tags in the sidebar of a page, however due to the way that Drupal requires you to layout your pages, you either have to:

• Set up the sidebar in your page template: create a block that will display on node pages, and output tags if it finds any. This is presents the problem of additional work to output a field (that Drupal already does well out of the box), and solutions that integrate well into the node-preview workflow are difficult.
• Set up the sidebar in your node template: write a preprocess that will get the particular block that you want to inject, which lacks flexibility. Or grab all blocks by region and inject them with a preprocess manually, which generally adds the overhead of re-loading and re-rendering blocks; in Drupal 7 this is particularly an issue with dynamically assigned paginators (ie. via EntityFieldQuery.)

This solution is more robust, as it takes ownership of the blocks, before they are placed on the page, and keeps them cached for dynamically re-using through the site. This way you can simply leave the page template to take ownership of the header and footer of the page, and have your sidebar within the node template.

This module uses a generic preprocess hook to inject the block regions into any template, allowing the designer to plan dynamic regions anywhere. This also provides a consistent, minimal overhead solution that doesn't require constantly checking underlying preprocess hooks to determine where injected elements are being derived from.

Usage

All blocks are exposed to templates in the blocks variable, keyed by region. Therefore if you wanted to output blocks in the region content_sidebar in the node template, you would need to use the following twig:

{{ blocks.content_sidebar }}

Using this you are able to define a sidebar within your node template, and output for example your field_tags normally using the field formatter, but then directly underneath output any dynamically assigned sidebar blocks to the page, such as advertisements, or user-related actions.

All blocks are available with the exception of the main content block (which it is likely you will be wanting to use this module to output regions within,) and the page title block; which requires the main content block to have been built first, however if you are on the subject of the page, you could output the title directly (ie. {{ label }} for a node.)