panels 6.x-3.0-beta1

Finally more or less feature complete, Panels 3 is now here for beta.

First please note: This release is definitely going to be buggy. There could definitely be bugs that will cause you to lose data. Please, when playing with Panels 3, take a backup of your database. This is particularly true prior to running an upgrade from an earlier version of Panels, and when doing anything major. It's a good safety precaution.

Please play with Panels on a dev site before you even start using it on production. There is a lot to understand and feel comfortable with.

What Panels 3 offers

• A flexible layout builder. Remember that old UI where you had to say '3 columns', then hit update and get a refresh for form gadgets so you could say how wide those columns should be? No more. Now you can do a few clicks, add a column and resize it visually.
• The ability to override specific pages, and provide different output based upon what that page is displaying. This means that you can override the node page and display 'story' nodes one way, 'page' nodes another, 'article' nodes yet a third way, let 'og' nodes have their own panel displays using og panels, and finally have any nodes that are written in arabic display completely differently as well. You could also have nodes written by administrators display differently, or nodes viewed by administrators might display differently as well.
• A redesigned 'add content' modal that's much easier to use. Content in it has been recategorized so that it's more about what the content is and less about where the content comes from.
• Like Views, when editing panel objects, things aren't saved until you're completely done. This is turning out to be both good and bad.
• Layouts and styles can be offered up by themes, as well as modules.

What's not done yet

• Most of the documentation. I've done some work on this, and that's going to be one of the big pushes next. Help would be appreciated. There are placeholders in the advanced help. Later beta versions should have more documentation and actually tell you about it.
• More work on the styles. Help appreciated here as well. See my blog post on angry donuts for more details.
• The ability to have Panels completely replace blocks. We're close, but the first release of Panels 3 won't likely get it.
• A really good administrative UI. This UI is still partially sucky. We'll get there, but for now, yes, we do understand that the UI is clunky and we're going to address this, but it'll take more time to work on the design.

Known bugs

There's no need to report these:

• Delegator doesn't get along with i18ntaxonomy.module, realname module and probably a few others that try to take over system pages. There is currently no warning that something is wrong. This will be addressed later, though it will be somewhat difficult to do well.
• When adding content to a flexible layout that you've added regions to, the content can disappear. Right now the best workaround is that when you're done designing or adjusting a flexible layout, you first save, and then add/move content.
• There's no way to clear the cached CSS. This mostly only affects developers.
• The upgrade path isn't perfect, but it works a lot better than the Views upgrade path did. Still, you may need to fix some problems on upgraded Panels. The easiest way to do it is to just delete the broken panes and re-add them.
• If you start to create a panel page and do not complete the process, you can end up with a broken page that you cannot do much with.

Important note: A lot of functionality has been split out of Panels and into the CTools module, which is a host of tools that other modules can rely on. Aside from some javascript and form improvements, the entire context and content system has been moved there. This means that CTools is required by Panels 3, and it also means that other modules can start taking advantage of these tools as the authors feel like it.

For this release, you must also install CTools 1.0-beta1 along with Panels. Other versions may not work and cause nasty bugs!