Difference between posterbox and headerbox in baposter

Question

What is the difference between posterbox environment and headerbox command in baposter? The documentation is very poor and the supplied examples all use headerbox command which is not even mentioned in the documentation.

Answer 1

According to the changelog in the header of baposter.cls the \headerbox command was replaced with the posterbox environment on 26. August 2011 by Reinhold Kainhofer (in order to support the verbatim environment it seems).

In that class file you can see that the \headerbox command is provided for backwards-compatibility and simply wraps the posterbox environment. Here is the relevant snippet staring on line 838 as of 2017-05-23:

% Backward-compatibility definition (\headerbox command uses posterbox env):
  \newcommand{\headerbox}[3]{%
    \begin{posterbox}[##2]{##1}
      ##3
    \end{posterbox}
  }

I recommend using the posterbox environment as it makes the source code more readable (block contents are clearly delimited) and likely will support more special environments.

I agree that the documentation is somewhat outdated, better to read the class source. It's not that long and includes many helpful comments.