Drupal module for webmaster block management?

Question

The person managing a site I'm working on wants to be able to decide what blocks go where. There is already a nice interface for this in Drupal (selecting the region from a drop down) but I'd like to hide certain blocks from this user. These are blocks he should not be able to move around.

Afaik this is not possible via the Permissions. Is there a module that allows fine grained control of what blocks can be managed by whom? I'd rather not write a custom interface ...

Thanks, Stef

Answer 1

Take those blocks out of regions and embed them into your template manually using module_invoke().

$block = module_invoke('module_name', 'block', 'view', 'block name or ID');

print '<h2>' . $block['subject'] . '</h2>';
print $block['content'];

Answer 2

Maybe give Blockqueue a try? I've never used it, but it appears to cover your use case.

Answer 3

Well, you can create a simple custom module like this (replace my_module with your custom module's name, obviously):

    function my_module_perm()
    {
        return array('view special blocks');
    }   



    function my_module_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
      if ($form_id == 'block_admin_display_form') {
        if(!user_access('view special blocks')) {
            $special_blocks = array( ); // Specially hidden blocks go here

            foreach($special_blocks as $block) {
                unset($form[$block]);
            }
        }
      }
    }

And then:

1. Add the blocks you want to hide into the $special_blocks array (it's basically the id of the block's div minus block_ )
2. Create a new account, and possibly a new role for this guy
3. Permission-wise, the new user's role should have access administration pages and administer blocks on, but shouldn't have view special blocks

Tested on Drupal 6.6, should work on other 6.x versions (and maybe 5.x with a few modifications)