The latest dev version kicks ass! (although it does take some effort to find).

Now I am happy and confused. Like many people I am late to the Panels party, and so many things are not quite obvious. This module is becoming a major piece of infrastructure and needs a group with an FAQ - it's the only way we'll ever have a chance of documenting it.

I am willing to contribute effort to FAQ editing, but I do not have the Understanding of The Way of The Panels yet :(

For example, here are three issues that definitely belong in an FAQ:

1) in "Panel Nodes Settings" at admin/panels/panel-node I just stare at "New Content Beahvior" and cannot figure out what it does (experiments have produce nothing so far).

2) Panels produce wonderful UI for the admin. What about the end users? Are we going to empower them move the blocks around and such? O is this outside of the scope and I should turn to another module? Or is it supposed to be working and I have not configured it right?

3) Panels versus Regions... now that is going to be an interesting discussion...

I know you guys are busy polishing the code, so help us (users) help you document it. - We'll do our part!

Comments

andrabr’s picture

Answering (partially) my question 1:

When you create a block, it is automaticaly shown in the "Allowed Block content:" list. By default its checkbox is empty and so it will not show up as available for your panels.

If you tick "New content behavior: New Block", then every new block is auto-ticked and so is available.

I have not been able to replicate this behavior with other items on the list yet (granted, "New Custom" sounds kinda cryptic).

I hope this helps someone.

merlinofchaos’s picture

a) Go to the panels working group on g.d.o; join the group and create a wiki page.

1) Yup, that's a difficult one to understand. Because all content is pluggable, what you're doing is defining the behavior for content Panels doesn't yet know about; for example, some module might provide a panels content type. All you can know about it in advance is that some other content might be coming. THis provides the default behavior for future content added to the system. If checked, when new content is added, your admins automatically get access to it. If not checked, when the new content is seen it will not be made available until explicitly added.

2) This is future functionality, and something that is pluggable. The underlying API is meant to be used that way. Likely the first incarnation will be the panels profile module (see the issue in the queue; Sam Tresler is going to hopefully make some headway on this). In that case, users will be able to have their own profiles that they can mess with. Ken Rickard is slowly working on porting MySite stuff to Panels as well.

3) Oh yes, this discussion is interesting. This one is going to be hard. THe answer is yes, I want to eventually.

yched’s picture

THe answer is yes, I want to eventually.
And yet there was no question :-)
So Earl, you're officially targeting Panels to overcome blocks and regions ?

merlinofchaos’s picture

yched: Yes. The difficulty lies in how to go about it. I've thought of two reasonably workable approaches:

1) Write a theme engine that uses panels -- there would be no page.tpl.php; instead, all pages would be layouts, the $page would be a context and that context would supply all of the little gizmos that currently exist.

Or

2) Supply an alternate index.php that replaces menu_execute_active_handler with a Panels function that gets the content and runs it through a panel display.

In both cases, the trouble is figuring out how to assign a page to a given display; also, it'd need to integrate well enough with panels-pages so that you can have all of the niftiness of a panels page without needing to embed panels within themselves too much.

This is far future stuff.

merlinofchaos’s picture

Status: Active » Fixed

Discussion on this can continue here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/7350#comment-23304

Anonymous’s picture

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

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