dirname() is a slow function compared with __DIR__ and using
'/../'. Moodle has a large number of legacy files that are included
each time a page loads and is not able to use an autoloader as it is
functional code. This allows those required includes to perform as
best as possible in this situation.
There is a new theme property 'blockrendermethod' that can be set by the
theme in its config.php and tells Moodle what method it is using to render
blocks in the layout files.
Either blocks, or blocks_for_region.
Then when adding custom block regions to a page content we ensure we use
the same method the theme is using elsewhere.
This is really a hack becuase we (I) didn't properly deprecate
blocks_for_region when I added the blocks method.
Thanks very much to Remote Learner Canada, especially Hubert Chathi and Olav Jordan, for their work on the bulk of this code, and also Mike Churchward for supporting them. I worked on it after that (actually simplified it by removing a feature temporarily: multiple pages) to bring it more to what I was imagining, and to provide a base to build on and get all the navigation perfect.
There's still work to do. Some blocks don't quite work as expected, and some of the code still needs upgrading to bring it fully into line with 2.0. We also could use a much better course overview block and better CSS styling of the profile pages. But it's definitely more usable this it was, I think.
