Displaying a node in a block

I had a requirement to display a custom block on a drupal site, but to allow site editors to update the contents of the block. I don’t particularly want to give editors the ability to create/edit blocks, but they are already able to edit nodes.

A bit of PHP in a custom block does the (somewhat hackish) trick:

<?php
$node = node_load(array('nid'=>1));
echo node_view($node, false, false, false);
?>

Obviously, the node id is hard coded. No, this is not elegant or ideal, but it quickly solves a problem.

Also worth noting is the following snippets of template.php and node.tpl.php in my phptempalte theme, which allow me to contol the display of the “info” (attribution) for node types–if you use a page node as the target of the above block, you can turn off the display of the info line while not affecting story nodes.

template.php:

<?
function _phptemplate_variables($hook, $vars) {
	switch ($hook) {
	case 'node':
		$vars['info'] = theme_get_setting('toggle_node_info_' . $vars['node']->type);
		break;
	}
	return $vars;
}
?>

node.tpl.php:

<?php if ($info): ?>
  <div class="info"><?php print $submitted ?>
  <?php if ($terms): ?>[<?php print $terms ?>]<?php endif; ?>
  </div>
<?php endif; ?>