Practical PanelsMike Keran and Jared Stoneberg

Who We Are

Mike Keran

Freelance Drupal developer, sitebuilder and reluctant themer

drupal.org: mikekerweb: www.MikeKeran.com

twitter: @mikekeran <crickets chirping>

Who We Are

Jared Stoneberg

Partner, Number 10 Web Company

drupal.org: rocksoupweb: www.number10webcompany.com

twitter: @rock_soup

● The smartest people in the room

● The world’s greatest panels experts

● The only people who have tried to solve these problems

● The only people you should hear from

Who We Aren’t

What We are Going to Talk About

● General Concepts - Variants, Selection Rules, Contexts

● Mini Panels

● Custom Content Panes

● Views Panes

● Panels Extensions we love: Fieldable Panels Panes, FAPE, Custom Panels Layouts

What we won’t be talking about

● Comparisons with other systems

● Moving quickly through the beginner stuff so we have time for the intermediate and advanced

● “Best” practices… because these are “our” practices

General Concepts

● This is a CTools system; its cousin is Views

● Panels replaces Drupal core’s block module

● Provides an easy to use layout builder

● Pluggable! Use custom code to make your own layouts, contexts, selection criteria, etc.

Just a few terms...

Adding content

Extending Panels

Mini Panels

● Despite the different UI, it’s just a panel…

● … that you can put into another panel’s panes

● Perfect for headers/footers/sidebars

● Can receive context from Panel

Views Panes

● Adds a new display plugin to Views

● Override common settings on a pane-by-pane basis

● Panel context can be passed as a contextual filter

Custom Content Panes

● Easily insert custom content in a pane

● Limitations:

○ Content is saved with panel config

○ Can be difficult to restrict access

○ Can’t reuse panes

○ Hard to undo changes

Fieldable Panels Panes (FPP)

● Fieldable: Brings the FieldAPI to a custom content pane

○ (Along with all that is good about the FieldAPI: display settings, revisions, widgets)

● Only the config gets stored in code; content remains in the database

● Pane content is (optionally) reusable

● But it also has some limitations...

Custom Panels Layouts

Field API Pane Editor (FAPE)

Panels Extra Styles

Panels Existing Pages

● Page Manager runs into problems when you try to use it with paths that are already “owned” by someone else, like Core or Commerce

● PM Existing Pages allows you to wrestle those paths back

Exportables, Features and UUIDs

https://drupal.org/node/1277908

Democopy of demo site at

github.com/rocksoup/panelsdemo

Questions?