On complex sites you'll have a lot of regions with a lot of blocks in them. When you then want your site editors to publish blocks - i. e. a teaser that promotes a new campaign - you need to confront them with a rampant admin/build/block page.

On top of that, blocks don't have any workflow control and are complicated to manage on multilingual sites. So, imagine you can just publish a node to the sidebar as you publish to your front page - with a simple, familiar interface, full workflow control and full control over the block's settings - just like on the block's own settings page.

"Isn't there a module that does that?"

Yes - it's a great little module called nodeasblock published by Mark Fredrickson in November last year. It lacks full block settings control though, exactly what we are about to add now.

Jose Reyero just posted a patch to the nodeasblock module that expands on an earlier contribution by Jeff Eaton that added region, visibility and weight settings for blocks to the node edit form.

The latest patch completes those settings by adding block, user, role and page specific controls.

When you create a node as block, you won't have to go to the admin/build/block page anymore to control the block's settings.

If you have a multilingual site with the latest internationalization module on, nodeasblock and internationalization will handle language dependent blocks for you.

In addition to complete block settings on the node edit form, the latest patch provides some useful presets like limiting the block regions a certain node type can be published to.

For the hands on guys out there - the patch is currently in review status, check it out here: http://drupal.org/node/133452