I've just started developing in express and am new to Jade as well.
I'm having trouble deciding when it's appropriate to use layouts and when not to. I'm also having trouble deciding when it's appropriate to use something like blocks vs. partials.
Any help regarding this is truly appreciated. I'm a little lost.
It's mostly a matter of preference. If you are used to something like Wordpress where you have a concept of a header and footer that you include into pages than you might not like layouts. I personally only use layouts with content blocks because the non-layout way tends to cause more repetition.
As for partials vs blocks. You use a partial for items that you want to reuse on different pages. While a block is a chunk of html that will be replaced by child templates.
An example of a partial can be the html for a product. So you have a thumbnail, the title and a description of a product. You might use this partial while listing the products in a category. But you might also use this partial for rendering a list of search results.
An example of a partial can be a main layout that contains you header and your navigation and a content area. If you want to reuse this main layout on multiple pages you will extend this it and overwrite the block in the child templates.
