Panels: From Zero to Hero in 2000 seconds

Executive summary

This 3-part talk provides a bird’s-eye view of the current Panels ecosystem, outlining why Panels exists, how to get started, how to dig deeper by pulling in Views and contextual data, and how our dev team at Code Enigma set up a generic panels architecture for almost all of our projects.

Summary

The Panels module is an incredibly useful and versatile module. Our team, as many others, are using Panels at the core of their Drupal 7 site architecture. However, due to its many moving parts it can be tricky to get started, use the right component in the right place and get it all nicely exportable and deployable.

This talk is meant to illuminate beginners, intermediary and advanced site builders and developers alike.

In three parts we discuss the current Panels ecosystem, outlining why Panels exists, how to get started, how to dig deeper by pulling in Views and contextual data, and how our dev team at Code Enigma set up a generic panels architecture for almost all of our projects.

(Slides and full sample code will be available online after the talk)

Outline Part 1: getting started (10 min)

• General intro and reason of existence
• Building new Panel Pages and Variants
• Panel Pages vs Panel Nodes

Part 2: going deeper (10 min)

• Custom Panel Panes, Mini Panels and Views Content Pane Displays
• Adding a layer of complexity with Panel Contexts
• Providing Panel Panes through a custom Panels plugin

Part 3: Code Enigma’s Common Panels Architecture (10 min)

• Completely replacing the core block system with modules like Panels Everywhere and Panelizer
• Keeping html markup clean and meaningful with Semantic Panels and/or Planer, our custom version of Semantic Panels
• Extra (if time permits): Custom panel plugin code examples
  • programmatically providing a Views content pane with a contextual filter
  • programmatically providing a Views content pane with exposed term option