Changes to Blocks Module in .8x

The following changes will affect modules that directly access the blocks tables of PostNuke - for example Autotheme.

First, to access the tables of another module you must load those tables first. This was the case with .7x but the blocks entries in the root pntables file meant you didn’t need to for the blocks module. There is no root pntables file in .8x. So before you access the blocks table you must call pnModDBInfoLoad() to load the db table information i.e. pnModDBInfoLoad(’Blocks’).

Second the actual blocks table has changed. In .8x the blocks modules implements user definable block positions and assigning blocks to more than one block position. The Theme (Xanthia) module then becomes a template manager module only.

The blocks module offers three tables:

1. Blocks - As with .7x this handles block instances however it doesn’t contain either ordering (weight) or position fields.
2. Block positions - this table contains the block positions. The defaults with a new install are left, right and center.
3. Block placements - this is a linkage table that contains the block id, position id and order defining what blocks are in what block position and in what order.