Display a block even if it is empty

Question

I am using a menu_block block that displays sub-menus depending on what page the user is. on some pages, there are no sub-menus, so my menu-block is automatically hidden by drupal. how do i force drupal to display my block even if it is empty?

thanks.

Answer 1

I don't know of a way to explicitly force a block (title) to render if the block content is empty.

I would have hidden the block title from the block itself, and the put the title in an appropriate template.

Answer 2

One way would be to actually put something in it... but hide it via CSS. I actually had to do that to accomplish a quick hack to lobotomize some bad legacy code.

Answer 3

You could create a second block that simply contained the title and then toggle the block visibility based on whether or not the other block exists. You can achieve this by either turning on the PHP filter module and writing some custom PHP to detect if the first block is present or not, or you can write a custom module to do this if you don't want PHP filter on as noted here: Is there a way to set block visibility programmatically (not using the PHP Filter module)