Roadmap? - No release for 9 months and many patches [#1960336]

Forgive me if this exists somewhere, but it seems there have been many commits and patches but few recent releases (beta, RC or otherwise) of panels. I imagine that this is creating many fragmented and patched versions. It seems that node-panels, for example, are being depreciated in favor of panelizer and there are other compatibility issues which have been addressed.

Do the maintainers have some guidance or roadmap that can help us keep a current version maintained?

Comments

Comment #1

charlie charles CreditAttribution: charlie charles commented 5 April 2013 at 09:10

I think I heard that drupal 8 is going come with a type of Panels version
replacing the region blocks manager

Comment #2

sonicthoughts CreditAttribution: sonicthoughts commented 15 April 2013 at 17:55

Well with 150k+ sites using panels it would be great to beta good understanding of the future roadmap if such a thing exists.

Comment #3

sonicthoughts CreditAttribution: sonicthoughts commented 15 April 2013 at 17:55

Comment #4

sonicthoughts CreditAttribution: sonicthoughts commented 15 April 2013 at 17:55

Comment #5

charlie charles CreditAttribution: charlie charles commented 16 April 2013 at 17:53

I agree, the problem is at the moment
there seem's to be too many diverse development projects for panels.
That don't take in account what the website users want.

The panopoly project for example
is upgrade of features for panels done by a different development team

http://drupal.org/project/panopoly

The Display Suite seems to want to take over panels too

They would be better working together
just to improve panels

Comment #6

sonicthoughts CreditAttribution: sonicthoughts commented 17 April 2013 at 21:06

Unfortunately this lack of leadership and openness is both the blessing and curse. I'm all for healthy competition but all the forking, abandonment and ideology are really undermining drupal. I'm never sure if I should use a module as it may abandon soon - but Panels??? This should be immune!

Comment #7

charlie charles CreditAttribution: charlie charles commented 18 April 2013 at 15:22

The problem is there's not a core layout design module for drupal 7
and every website needs layout design.

Comment #8

merlinofchaos CreditAttribution: merlinofchaos commented 18 April 2013 at 15:32

Panels is not abandoned. But my time is limited.

There isn't currently a roadmap at all.

If there are patched versions, I would hope that most people are using the -dev rather than a few individual patches. The Panels queue is relatively clean, compared to the CTools queue.

Comment #9

charlie charles CreditAttribution: charlie charles commented 18 April 2013 at 15:34

So problem is with Drupal 7 it try's to focus you away from
hand coding a layout like you do with Joomla or wordpress templates

There is no core layout design module for Drupal 7
and everyone needs it. So all the developers come up
with their own answers to this.

Comment #10

sonicthoughts CreditAttribution: sonicthoughts commented 19 April 2013 at 14:56

merlinofchaos : you are a Drupal Rock Start (really!!!)- I mean it, and I'm sure your time is extremely valuable and can only imagine how annoying these posts are, but please consider how important Panels are to the success of Drupal and with the display wars it can appear to a neophyte like me that Panels is losing momentum (yes, I have seen the usage stats.) and with the backlog of patches and commits may I make a few suggestions:

1. Consider creating some sort of roadmap that could show integration or differentiate w/ other initiatives. Even a quick post would help.
2. Clarify what the core panels module should/could do and others should (ie. Panelizer and node overrides.)
3. Perhaps seek additional co-maintainers who can give you bandwidth.
4. Provide a perspective (ie. commitment) to Drupal 8
5. Release beta or RC versions and use the recommended flag to help guide neophytes like me. The trouble with patches is that you typically have to go there after something breaks.

Please understand I say this with the deepest gratitude for your contributions - I suspect there are others like me with these concerns. As marga123 points out, IMHO the deeper issue is with Drupal leadership and guidance. Many people have committed to a module or approach only to find it lose momentum and thereby having to spend countless hours backtracking efforts.

Comment #11

merlinofchaos CreditAttribution: merlinofchaos commented 19 April 2013 at 16:20

I don't have a real roadmap, because for the most part, Panels is relatively complete. Here's what I DO know:

Panels is intended to handle the following tasks:

Provide a drag * drop UI for rendering layouts and their content. This includes the layout plugins and the style and the renderer plugins.
Provide the system to handle mini panels (because nothing else will).
Ensure that the API for utilizing Panels in applications is solid, which means including UIs for features can be embedded elsewhere. For example, the allowed content and add content dialogs are in Panels.

The panel nodes module is to be deprecated, but unfortunately there is currently no one working on the migration path to Panelizer. Hopefully somebody will have some time to pick that up again, because the patch was very close right up until the time I had to rewrite Panelizer to make it support non-node entities.

Everything else: Providing URLs with Panels (page manager), providing entity integration (Panelizer) and theme integration (Panels Everywhere) is the responsibility of other modules.

I'm actually pretty happy with the Panels -dev; the primary reason I have not rolled a new release is that I haven't had time to deal with making sure the release is stable. Every time I get pushed into doing a release by people clamoring for one, I find that there's one critical bug that causes a flood of issues and I have to scramble to fix it. I really don't like being responsible for breaking people's sites, and that's why I am willing to go a LONG time between releases.

Drupal's release system does not really handle point beta/rc releases very well. People will upgrade to them immediately regardless of whether or not they have the beta/rc tag, and the above paragraph ends up applying anyway, only now people are confused about what the beta/rc tag means. The people who know the release system well enough to respect the beta/rc flag are the people most likely to be able to help anyway, so I end up cutting the most useful people out of the equation.

The CTools queue is much, much worse than the Panels queue; I had some time to reduce the patch queue in Panels to something manageable a couple months ago, but I haven't had time to stay on top of it. For that I'm sorry.

I've had no luck getting reliable co maintainers. The fact is, modules like I write are a particularly large commitment, and very few people want to do it or are trustworthy and capable enough to do it.

The best way to help, then, is to help me out with the patch queue; the more things that are solidly RTBC (meaning clearly well tested and well reviewed) the less time I have to spend on reviewing them to make sure they're right. And actually using the -dev and making sure that it functions well in as many situations as possible so that when I do roll a release, I can feel comfortable that it won't break people's sites.

Comment #12

merlinofchaos CreditAttribution: merlinofchaos commented 19 April 2013 at 16:21

Oh, and as for Drupal 8, SCOTCH is still in process and no one knows, for sure, what it will look like when everything is all said and done. I am not making any commitments until I have a clear idea of how much functionality I will even be able to use. Lots of CTools will get to go away (yay) but I will probably have to do a massive amount of re-coding on other stuff to maintain functionality. I fear the upgrade path.