Actually, you can exclude blocks, like the search box, by URL pretty easily in the Drupal admin panel. Wildcards are excepted too. No need to use PHP unless y

Actually, you can exclude blocks, like the search box, by URL pretty easily in the Drupal admin panel. Wildcards are excepted too. No need to use PHP unless you have some very complicated rules on when to show certain blocks to certain users. And even then, if you make a syntax error in any code in any CMS -- whether it's stored in the DB or not -- your site's gonna break in some way.