blocks

This module uses ctools context, content types, access and export to create a small, efficient extension of the Drupal 7 core block system. The project includes some examples that demonstrate the basic functions.

a custom block module template that will allow you to insert code into programmatically defined blocks

Drupal's default behaviour is to render every single block on your site that's assigned to any region on every single page view, regardless of whether the region's content is actually being visibly printed out or not.

If you're doing a bunch of complex queries in those feature blocks, and you're not hiding the block by one of the following:

Block Queue solves one of the major shortcomings of Drupal 6 block management: the ability to easily re-use blocks in different regions, on different pages, with arbitrary ordering.

Block Queue allows users to create "queues" of blocks much like Nodequeue allows to create queues of nodes: by adding arbitrary blocks to the queue and ordering them any way necessary. Queue size can be limited.

Queues are exposed as blocks and can be easily included in Drupal regions.

BlockTheme allows an admin to define tpl files for standard block templates and provides a select box on the block configure form so the user can select a tpl file to use as opposed to having to override the templates by block ID.