I propose that as much as possible, landing pages in Commons (eg site homepage, group homepages) be exported into their own features separately of the underlying views and other dependencies. The reason for that is to simplify customization on a per-site basis. If I want to customize a page, I can disable the Commons_Homepage feature and create a new Panels page that has the blocks and content I want, featurize it, and run my site in a default (non-overridden) state.

Comments

ezra-g’s picture

ezra-g commented
Title: Proposed approach for Commons Landing Page Features » Proposal: Export landing pages separately from underlying components (Views, blocks, etc)
izkreny’s picture

izkreny commented

I like your proposal. Although, we should probably need to get our hands dirty to found out how hard/easy will be to customize Commons without breaking update path.

Possibly related and interest issue: #1713524: Mini Panels + the Sidebar Problem

WRT #1664956: Make Open Outreach Panopoly-based:

How to handle block placement? - This is probably the $64,000 question around all of this and I have seen a lot of different ways to solve this. The easiest solution is to realize that most sites have relatively modest needs around the sidebar and it would be easy enough with the proper page library #1713506: Create a Master Panels Page Administration Pane to make the process "if you want to change the sidebar, just change all the pages". This obviously wont scale, but might be easy enough. The more elegant solution would be to leverage the power of mini panels #1713524: Mini Panels + the Sidebar Problem to create different "sidebars" that can be placed through the IPE and generally administered from an admin/dashboard/sidebars page.
crimsondryad’s picture

crimsondryad commented

I'm for Mini Panels. Scaling doesn't sound like a big deal, but doesn't everyone hope their community grows like wildfire? Then it's a BIG problem.

I do plan on customizing our Commons install quite a bit, so having landing pages in a separate feature would be really really nice. We're going to wall off our garden. It would be super special if there was a way for those snifty landing pages to easily handle that.

ezra-g’s picture

ezra-g commented
Status: Active » Fixed

We're following this approach - marking as fixed.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.