Region not displaying in module

Question

I'm working on a site where much of the back-end is handled by a site-specific custom module.

I have a sidebar region and within

Within module-thing.php is a call to <?php print render($page['sidebar']); ?> to print a region but it is not showing anything despite the region being set with content within the Blocks administration. I'm wondering if this is expected to work from within a module.. is there something i can do to show it?

I found this (right at the top) but doesn't seem to work in drupal 7 http://www.chrischen.me/content/drupal-how-access-regions-blocks-themes-or-modules..

Answer 1

The code to print page regions must be in your theme's page.tpl.php file, not in a file in a custom module.

If you want to put your code in a separate file (sidebar.php) you need to make sure it's included in page.tpl.php, like

include './sidebar.php'; // file is in the same folder as page.tpl.php

or

module_load_include('php', 'MYMODULE', 'sidebar'); // file is in a module folder

hope it helps

Answer 2

I found the easiest way was to do this:

<?php
  $region = block_get_blocks_by_region('region_name_here');
  print render($region);
?>

See the docs for more information: https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules!block!block.module/function/block_get_blocks_by_region/7

In your module where you tried to print the sidebar region using the method used in a page template, use this snippet above instead. This method can also be used in html.tpl.php where the "usual" method cannot.