Here’s a case of “over engineering” by the drupal engineers. They took a module that is working just fine and broke it.

In drupal, pages are made up of one or more blocks. From the handbook:

Blocks are the boxes of related/grouped data that are visible in the left and/or right sidebar(s) of your web site. They can also be placed anywhere on your page using regions. These are usually generated automatically by modules (e.g. recent forum topics), but administrators can also create their own defined blocks.

Once the blocks are designed and laid out, changing themes was snappy and did not affect the positioning and layout of blocks. This is great for me, cause I am trying to migrate my Intranet website to drupal and provide multiple themes to my users.

In 4.7.3, it got broke. Now blocks need to be manually set for each theme. I have more than 10 themes installed. That means I have to go to every theme, muck with it, and ensure that it is working properly. Everytime I look at a new theme, upgrade a theme, I’ll have to repeat this process. What a waste of time!

Fortunately, there is a new module, called block region. that tries to fix this problem.

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