Agaric wants to turn sidebars on or off on a page by page basis in Drupal

Agaric Design Collective, every third site or so, really wants to be able to just tell a page: you see that sidebar? Don't display it. We don't care if we put blocks in it. We don't care if

Yeah, Agaric knows Drupal doesn't even know what a page is. Pages are so web 1.0. But there are still, well web pages that do have a fairly stable existence in Drupal: about pages, views, panels, taxonomy listings. On some the nodes change, on some the nodes stay the same, but in every and all cases sometimes you just want to bust out of your site structure and get rid of a sidebar or two

Based on searches, no one else seems to care about this. Or be willing to ask, at least.

Ancient history: Display blocks based on taxonomy of current node
http://drupal.org/node/4529 (we did say ancient: 2004)

This can be done without so much difficulty through a theme. As of Drupal 5, you can very easily override your theme's main page.tpl.php with various versions of page-layout.tpl.php. See http://drupal.org/node/46006

One problem is Agaric would like this to be a module but regions like sidebars exist in the theme level. So it needs to be a themodule. Or a themedule. Or maybe a meme.

On the other hand the blocks settings page knows all about your themes regions, and this shouldn't be impossible to add on. And crazy stuff starts being possible once you allow people to add blocks to regions, and then use page-based logic (just like the current block system actually, paths and roles and custom php) on the regions themselves. Display this region or not? Define it in one rule, not for every damn block in the region. Heck, if we abstract a little more, we can tell Drupal to display this set of blocks in that region sometimes, not at all at others, and even switch regions wholesale.

This is probably what Panels 2 is doing. Last we checked Panels 2 would completely replace Drupal, electricity, and the need for web developers or users. It's that powerful and efficient. But we haven't tested these rumors that we just started against our usual Agaric labs rigorous scientific testing.

Resolution