Bond Lifestyle

In order to arrange content into different categories and site sections Bond Lifestyle uses a mix of Display Suite, Panels and Views.

Display Suite is used to control the layout of individual articles (their fields and their output formatting). But Display Suite can do more, such as attach Views-generated Blocks of additional related content. Each content type has its own layout requirements.

Panels is used to create several 'pages' or main sections of the site such as News and Articles. A good example of a Panels page is the Bond Lifestyle homepage, which has many different blocks and content organized into a magazine style frontpage. Just for clarity - we use Display Suite only to organize individual article layouts (teasers and full page views), but we use Panels to organize groups of content (Blocks, Views Content Panes, etc.) on a page.

Nodequeue is an important part of the system. Instead of organizing content alphabetically or by date we needed a solution to manually arrange content. Nodequeue is an excellent solution and it comes with a 'Smartqueue Taxonomy' extension to order the same piece of content within different taxonomy categories, allowing for fullest flexibility.

The Drupal vBulletin integration works well to establish a single sign-on between Drupal and the vBulletin discussion board. It works both ways. Users can register from either end and find themselves logged in to both systems.

Several other tools we could not do without are the Media, Wysiwyg and reCaptcha modules. These help to manage comments and write up articles with multimedia content.

Our theme is custom designed, but built on the original Bartik theme for Drupal 7. Of course we added our own regions and worked with the Drupal "template hints" to do some custom magic. I have built dozens of Drupal themes and all of them are basically derivatives of the original Bartik theme - it is incredibly adaptable.

Display Suite configuration and template hints

The site uses 4 sets of custom 'Display Suite Layouts': Articles, Events, News and Products. Although Display Suite is designed to be very flexible even without template hints (custom template overrides in your theme folder), we needed to have more flexibility. In our theme folder a subfolder resides called 'ds_layouts' where we store Display Suite layouts, which can be configured on Drupal's Content Type > Manage Display pages for each content type. Our DS layouts thus match our four content types.

A custom Display Suite layout set consists of a CSS file (usually small and only describes layout), an .inc file with code settings and the .tpl.php file (the actual template) containing PHP code to display fields and regions.

Use of the Panels module

The Panels module allows you to create separate 'pages' with custom layouts. Such a page is different from a 'node' (Drupal's content), because it can contain multiple lists of nodes. So we use a Panels page to display content on them. We have two basic Panels pages:

1. Frontpage
2. Taxonomy term pages

1. The Frontpage Panel

The frontpage has a complex custom layout. In our theme folder there is a subfolder 'layout' which contains a custom 'twocol_home' layout set. It functions similar to a Display Suite template as explained above. Using a .tpl.php file we can describe a layout that is specific to the homepage. Why not use Drupal's theme regions? Well, there is a theming hierarchy between themes, Panels pages and Display Suite layouts.

• Themes describe the semi-fixed skeleton of your whole website;
• Panels pages can theme the content region with more elaborate layouts for specific pages; within themes
• Display Suite layouts describe layouts of individual pieces of content within pages within themes.

Using a combination of all three provides for greater granularity and flexibility for theming Drupal sites, from the global framework down to individual content.

2. The Taxonomy Term Pages

Panels allows you to set conditional content based on URL path or other system variables. For the taxonomy term pages we created conditions for different vocabularies. For example, the vocabulary 'Gift Ideas' shows different content than the vocabulary we use for 'Products'. Using Panels, we show different Views 'content panes' based on set conditions. Panels variables are available to these Views content panes, so you can create custom queries based on the conditions set in the Panel.