By Thomasr976 on

I have created a panel page with a two column layout. i want to insert four groups of content that consists of nodes from specific categories such as Health, Diet, Beauty, Travel. What is the best way to do this?

I thought that the best way to do this might be to use views. That way I could easily select the node types that i wanted (e.g. just stories and blogs) and sort them in descending order, and just list the node title. I guess I could do a view for each category and then select that view for each of my categories in my panels. However, I thought that there might be an easier way using arguments and context to do this after looking at the Panels Demo at http://panels.demo.logrus.com/

Have spent days trying to get my head around this and would appreciate suggestions. I really want to learn panels well and pass insights back to the community by working on panels documentation so let me hear from you.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

adam_b’s picture

adam_b commented

Personally, I try to avoid arguments (in all senses) unless they're really needed. I'd make a view and create four block variants, with a different category in each variant, then call them individually into the appropriate panel areas. Unless you're going to be changing it all the time, that should be easy enough.

Thomasr976’s picture

Thomasr976 commented

Thanks for the prompt response. That would definitely get me a solution and I will do this if a more elegant solution does not present itself. Really wanted to fully understand the power of arguments and context and use them here and in other situations.

adam_b’s picture

adam_b commented

Understood, but I'm not sure that this is a good situation for arguments (though I don't have experience with contexts).

I've found arguments to be most useful when I'm starting from a particular node and want to carry the node ID or term on to a view linked from that node. In your case you'll have four views on the same page, with no specified data available so I'm not sure what you expect to get.

However, I'm definitely not an arguments expert, so I'd expect someone else to be able to provide more useful info.