title: Drupal 7: creating custom content block
body: <p>I'm new to Drupal and am trying to embed a Flash game in the middle of the front page. I've created a "Full HTML" text format in <strong>Home >> Administration >> Configuration >> Content authoring</strong> and I've created a new block using that format by going into <strong>Home >> Administration >> Structure >> Blocks</strong> and placed it into <strong>Content</strong> region and display it at the <strong>&lt;front&gt;</strong> page only:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/nTMmn.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>My problem is that I need to pass the user id and also a custom gender field to the swf file through the FlashVars parameter.</p>
  
  <p>I can see my gender field in the database (I use PostgreSQL 8.4.7/CentOS 5.5/PHP 5.3):</p>
  
  <pre><code># select * from field_data_field_gender;
   entity_type | bundle | deleted | entity_id | revision_id | language | delta | field_gender_value
  -------------+--------+---------+-----------+-------------+----------+-------+--------------------
   user        | user   |       0 |         6 |           6 | und      |     0 | Male
   user        | user   |       0 |         5 |           5 | und      |     0 | Male
   user        | user   |       0 |         1 |           1 | und      |     0 | Male
   user        | user   |       0 |         7 |           7 | und      |     0 | Female
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And I see the users table:</p>
  
  <pre><code># select uid, name from users;
   uid | name
  -----+-------
     5 | Vasja
     6 | Vanja
     1 | Alex
     0 |
     7 | Petja
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But how could I print them into my custom content block?</p>
  
  <p>I also suppose there is already some prefilled data structure there, something like a $user array?</p>
  
  <p>Please give me a bit help and directions to get me running on custom blocks. </p>
  
  <p>I'm looking at the docs, but they're talking about custom modules, which is probably a bit overkill in my case?</p>
  
  <p>And also I need to print a message to the Anonymous user telling him or her to sign in or register. Please give me a pointer here</p>
  
  <p>Thank you!
  Alex</p>
  
  <p>P.S. My understanding is that swfobject isn't working well with Drupal 7 yet, but that is not a big issue for me.</p>