Architecting Drupal Sites with Panels 3 session by Suzanne Kenendy at DrupalCamp Montreal

See also Hally Turner's notes on this presentation.

Suzanne Kennedy
Architecting Drupal Sites with Panels 3

Also try composite layout and other page layout module assistance.

Original motivation was a better alternative to the core block configuration.

• Sophisticated block management tool
• System for building custom layouts (drag-and-drop– but also integrates really well with the theme layer, and if you create custom regions it can use that)
• Organize context information in a central place

Pretty complicated user interface– like Views, can be overwhelming at first.

Enable:
Ctools - Page manager and Views content panes
Panels
Views

Panels nodes

Relatively easy to configure.

Panels pages

Overrides or creates a path.
Like Views– but can put multiple Views on the Panels page, and of course other elements.

Every Panels page needs a variant, the first one is created for us.

[gotcha] Don't forget to hit save! [/hotcha]

Instead of getting the View to look for an argument from the page URL, say, can leave it at display all values but have Panels force an argument on it.

You have to be careful what you give your administrators access to. You can let them override title, items per page, etc.– relatively safe things.

Create a new layout in your theme

in theme's .info - see http://drupal.org/node/495654

preprocess functions possible.

Panels needs some workarounds - or just doesn't work - for multilingual