Panels 3: Upgrading from Panels 2 to Panels 3

These are the basic steps for upgrading from Panels 2 to Panels 3 on Drupal 6:

1. Backup your site before you begin.
2. Disable your panels module.
3. If you have any panels exported, 'in code', please go and override them all. The upgrade can only update panels you have in the database.
4. Delete all old panel module files from the sites/all/modules directory.
5. Unpack the new panels files & Chaos Tools files in sites/all/modules.
6. Enable Chaos Tools, including the Page Manager module.
7. Run update.php.
8. Enable all panels modules (& Views Content Panes if you use views in your panels.)

After following these steps, Panels 3 should be working properly on your system. Make sure you upgrade on a test site before you upgrade on the live site, however, since there may be unforeseen issues.

If you do run into issues, here are some things you can try:

• Make sure you don't have any modules enabled that override pages like taxonomy/term/%, as this will cause conflicts with the Page Manager (see issue #469124: taxonomy/term/% overwritten by another module).
• Set panel panes to "No style" for Display if they are not showing up properly (see issue #507516: Problems with region styles after converting panels 2 panel-pages to panels 3 panel-pages).
• (This section needs expansion.)

After methodically following the steps above I found the following issues:

• The custom layout that had been applied to our panel was no longer applied. It was an easy fix of simply re-applying the layout.
• The panel was empty, the content areas had nothing in them. The fix was to reassign the various content to the appropriate content areas.