Content managing blocks

It’s a common requirement to have on the home page or a side rail a series of “blocks”.

These blocks may be a title, some blurb and an image with a link that may take you to a page.

I am wondering how to manage these blocks in WordPress. The client needs to be able to create these blocks themselves and then easily add them to “slots” on the home page or right rails.

So firstly I thought about how WordPress would faciliate “slots” for these blocks and I figured I would need to register side bars to do this. But that then means to get blocks into these sidebars there needs to be some kind of widget.

Then I thought about what the widget would be putting into the slots. The content needs to be easily manageable by the client and include an image upload (auto resized too). This made me think that the content could be a custom post type perhaps.

Which led me to think if there is a widget that adds a single post to the sidebar and lets me specify a template for how to format it out.

That is my current thinking on this but I really hope that someone has a suggestion. When you look through ThemeForest you always see these themes with columns/blocks in the design but they are never managed by a WordPress flow – they are always static in the template code.