Panels is one of those very important Drupal modules that many people use: not quite as common as Views or CCK, but it’s up there. Panels allows you to place content in various areas beyond the default regions in a Drupal theme, to put a complex multi-column layout in your content area, for example. To this point, I have not learned how to use Panels, but at Drupa Camp Twin Cities 2011, Will Jaspers gave a presentation on how to “Become a Panels rockstar in just one day.” Here is the session description:

Panels is a fantastic module which provides much needed flexibility to aggregate content from varying sources and help users and administrators alike use and re-purpose the information your website provides.

Assuming we can cover all of this in just one hour, you’ll learn:

• What a Panel, a Region and a Pane are.
• How to use the Panels Editor
• How to put custom content into a Pane
• How to use Contexts and Relationships
• How to put views into your panels
• How to make your Views re-usable for Panels
• How to use the Page Manager
• How to make Custom Access Rules
• How to use Views as Contexts
• A few themes that provide custom layouts
• How to code your very-own layout plugin
• How to use Panel layouts in Views

My notes on the session are available after the break.

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This demo of Panels will be done in Drupal 6, because of some bugs in Drupal 7, but Panels essentially works exactly the same in Drupal 7 as what we will see today.

What are panels?

Panels are a flexible way to display various content with specific access controls simultaneously.

What panels are not

• Replacement for all your content types
• Way to make freeform HTML pages
• Not as easy as making grilled cheese

Should I use panels?

• It depends
• How big is your site going to be?
• How important are any two different pieces of data to a certain user or persona?
• What content is needed and when?
• Context matters

Why not just use context modules?

• Reactions aren’t always so simple
• Can work together, but not in/as a panel
• Really big sites can be quite complex
• Large quantities of context reactions might be hard to manage
• Stressed about working with multiply layouts?
• What if I want to re-use the data on the page I am currently on?

What modules do I need?

Novice

• Chaos Tools suite (ctools)
• Panels
• Views
• Page manager

Other modules can be added in for additional functionality.

Intermediate

• Custom content panes

Advanced

• Views content panes
• Custom rulesets
• Mini-panels

Panel nodes

• Great way to learn how to use panels
• Customizable layouts
• Can add/remove blocks/forms/content as you please
• Limited access to more complex information, such as views
• Not a solution for all content

What are the components of a panel?

• Panels contain regions
• Regions contain panes
• Panes contain everything else

What’s a region?

• Building blocks of a panel
• Can be identified using custom classes and IDs
• Contain panes

What’s a pane?

• Panes are meat of a panel
• Any content added to panel is treated as a pane
• Can customize display with Stylizer or custom CSS

Page manager

What is a page?

• Not a standard HTML page
• URL which can:
  • Respond with specific HTTP status code
  • Display custom content
  • Help administrators manage site
  • Control who has access to it
  • Pull content from different sources for later display

Variant

• A deviation from the norm.
• A way to make one page act like several
• An opportunity to provide different levels of access to content
• A way to take some complexity out of your site

Selection criteria

• Allows the site to filter pages and variants on a myriad of attributes.
• Can be customized to meet specific needs.
• Can use criteria from contexts given to the page.

Why would I usea Selection rule?

• Without them, the page will take over all potential instances of content.
• Sometimes different types of visitors need different content.

What is a context?

• Related information to the subject at-hand.
• Information that can be re-purposed throughout the site.
• Additional information the user wants

Can contexts be inherited?

• In short no.
• If a Context is added to a Page a “Panel Node” cannot inherit it.
• It can be used to include specific content.
• Contexts can be passed to Views.

Using Views as Contexts

• Bring content into the page without loading everything.
• Use exposed views operators how you please.
• Give the user control to specific parts of the view.

Custom access rules

• Allows for complex access rules to be re-used and re-purposed throughout pages and panels.
• Exportable

Custom layouts

• Use Panels layouts as Views row formatters.
• Exportable

Why not build custom layouts with the layout manager?

• We like clean output.
• Hard to extend into 960.gs and other structural frameworks: Some themes provide these
• Extra step talking to the database
• Less control over CSS

Hard Coded Layout Plugins

• When built-in layouts just don’t do it.
• Only one line of code required to tell Panels where to look: plugins[layouts][] = foldername
• Where should I look for sample code? Check out the Zen theme and Adaptive Themes (AT) Panels

Creating a layout plugin

Your layout plugin will include:

My_layout.inc (Plugin file)

Contains the array of information regarding your layout for Panels

Name

Layout Name

Category

Groups layouts together

Template

User-facing .tpl template

CSS

User-facing .css file

Admin Template

Admin-facing .tpl

Admin CSS

Admin-specialized .css

Regions

Array of regions in template

My_layout.css (Common CSS for this layout)

 

My_layout.tpl.php (Output template)

How should I structure it?

Are you using a grid system?

What code is required?

Drupal 6

Drupal 7

Caveats: Will be used for any user if no admin template exists.

Admin.css (Optional Admin CSS file)

Admin.tpl.php (Optional Admin template)

How should I structure it?

Who can access it?

• This is only visible to administrators.

Why use it?

• Sometimes you/your client needs complex displays that aren’t very easy to edit/add content to.
• This makes it a breeze for admins to experience your panel structure exactly as is required!

Examples

mcad.edu uses Panels

My take

I will be completely honest, I still feel totally lost about how to use panels. I picked out a few key facts:

• Drupal themes have regions in which you can put content. Panels allows you to create mini-regions within a region in which you can put content, allowing you put a sub-layout within a larger layout.
• There is a wide variety of types of content you can put into the individual panes within the regions of a panel.
• You can use views to create the content that goes into a panel’s pane.
• Panels can be turned on based on the context of the page. There are far more options when looking at the context of a page than, say, just the URL of a page.

There is a lot of detail above that I copied down. I suspect that I may need to learn that detail more by doing and working through problems rather than by trying to understand panels in an abstract sense.