The login block in Drupal has been annoying me, as it’s a bit big and clunky for a site like this one, where the expectation is that most users won’t have an account and will not want to login.

I figured that it ought to be possible to make some smart menu login and register items in the navigation block which changed depending on whether or not someone was already logged in.

For various technical reasons this seems to be tricky (probably I just haven’t figured out how to do it), so I came up with an alternative.

The Smaller Login module implements a much smaller login block, which just contains a single line containing login and register links. If a user is already logged in, the whole block goes away (you can enable the log out block in the navigation menu to allow people to log out once they have logged in).

You can see the module in action on this site (if you’re not logged in, it should be visible at the top of the right-hand sidebar).