Is it possible to hide the title of a block in a region to render it separately from the content?
It might be easier to do this in the block.tpl.php file (using $block-&gt;region to determine the region) as you have the title printed out separately from content there.

In your test environment you can also use stuff like these to get a better overview of complex variables (will help you with issues like this):

drupal_set_message('&lt;pre&gt;'.var_export($content, TRUE).'&lt;/pre&gt;');

function print_r_html ($data) {
  ?&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;?php print_r($data); ?&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;?php
}