Require and place block in a drupal theme?

In a theme I'm creating I'm wanting to place blocks in locations that are different from the default开发者_开发百科 ones. Eg place the search block in the header.

Is there any way to do this from a theme: Be able to require a block and place it somewhere?

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The theming system of Drupal is flexible enough to turn exactly that part of the page into a region where you want your block to appear. For this you need to add the region to the theme's .info file as described on Assigning contents to regions, e.g regions[foobar] = Foobar. This will make a new variable $page['foobar'] available to your page.tpl.php. You can then assign content to the region the same way as with Drupal's builtin regions.

If you want to circumvent this system and display a block ad-hoc, have a look at how _block_render_blocks renders blocks.

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It defeats the idea of configurable blocks but nevertheless it's possible: You have to create empty block templates for all but the allowed region. Or you provide/override the theme function for this very block and return nothing for prohibited regions.

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In D7 you can add a placeholder region in your themes .info file, clear the cache and put your block in there you can then output the region's content.

print render(block_get_blocks_by_region('region_name'));