Blocks are containers for additional information that you can add to areas of your webpages. The menu, usually featured on the left-hand side of your site's pages is actually a block. Blocks can make your site more interesting by showing summaries of recent activity on your site (e.g. forum or content changes, etc.) and can allow a user to easily navigate to parts of your site from any page that they are viewing. When logged in as an administrator, you can easily add and remove a wide range of blocks to areas of your site – usually blocks are placed on either the left- or right-side of your pages.

To configure your website's blocks, log in as the administrator and then select the 'blocks' icon from the 'administration' area of the control panel.

The page you see now displays a list of all of the available blocks.

The first column in the list, 'Block', gives the name of the block; the second column, 'Enabled', tells you whether or not the block is displayed; the third column, 'Weight', shows how heavy the block is and thus whether the block should float to the top of the page (above other blocks) or whether it should sink down to the bottom of the page; and the fourth column, 'Placement', describes where on the page the block should be displayed.

The best way to find out what a particular block does – if its name does not suggest this to you – is to simply click the 'enabled' box and submit the changes. The block should then appear on your page. It is recommended that you try enabling at least the following blocks to see what they do:

• Newsletter

• Who's online

• Active forum topics

• Chatbox discussions

WARNING: Unless you are very confident with advanced management of the site, it is very important at this stage that you do not disable blocks 'User login' and 'Site menu', since these are required for user log-in and site navigation.