I have built a module that integrates with panels in a way that OG integrates with views. I've used bulk exporter to export some of the stuff and place it inside particular directories as the ctools API dictates. I've got entire panel pages and mini panels working great, they all load as they should.
My trouble is with panel page variants, referred to as "task handlers" in ctools. I've done all that is instructed in the documentation, exported them, used the right naming convention with the function to ensure it gets executed when necessary. Used XDebug to ensure the method was executed by placing a break point in the function, it gets called multiple times in a load execution of the "edit pages" page so I am sure the system is aware of the code, but when it comes down to these being available to the node_view page where they were originally created, it still opts for the DB variants and is completely unaware of the programatic versions
I looked into panel issues but found no such active issue, also I did find on another post Earl was saying how variant imports were totally Fubar'd but he claimed to have fixed it in a September 30th patch.
Panels current issue queue
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc/drupal/contributions/modules/panels/KNOWN_I...
panels current todo
http://groups.drupal.org/node/18765
Also by diving into code and stepping through I found two properties of the default $handlers object that gets exported that appears to be requisites of ctools for task handlers.
handler type - for the panels task hander this value is "context"
visible - if ctools recognizes this as a non visible handlers, it tosses it. This means if its not explicitly set to visible = true then the handler is thrown out.
Any help would be much appreciated, I am totally stumped on what is happening.