Drag Drop and Sort API

Excuse me while I take this moment to pick up my jaw. =)

Yes, I am all for ajaxifying panels.

I will comment further after I've looked at the module and read this a couple more times. (Jetlagged and feeling kind of dense just now; but seriously this is something I've wanted to do for awhile, and I have even bigger plans than what you've mentioned here. There will be more soonish)

Ok, I set up a test and played around with this. I very much like where this is going. There are, I think, some complications with what you want to do but none of them are insurmountable.

1) Not all content should be available to all users, so we will need to introduce some kind of permissions for what content is available.

2) This may also be true of configuration for content, but each content_type.inc will probably have to handle that by its own self.

3) Would simply wrapping the content be enough? It'd be nice if panels didn't have to force a content type into a particular layout, but I can see your point about this when I add a view, which doesn't work quite right.

4) The landing area for the drag and drop is kind of difficult to find; I keep having to move above where I instinctively think the landing area is going to be. It may just be that the area is too small or maybe where it's located.

5) You have my permission and blessing to redo the entire panels admin page using this; as long as it degrades gracefully I'll be extremely happy. I'd been thinking that the config should not be in a collapsible fieldset, but instead be in something like a lightbox -- i.e, when you open it it comes up like a dialog and dims the rest of the display; and also doesn't limit the gadgets in the config to the size of the panel.

Patches will be gratefully accepted and we can probably get a few people who'd be willing to help test this. If I have my way, this system will completely replace block management in Drupal, and with your ideas we can have user-controlled panels too.

For those interested in the issue, I have set up a test of what ayman posted here:

http://test.logrus.com/dnd_test

I checked in a 5.0 version last night. How's that for service? =)

Nice work, this is looking great!

I'm idly wondering what it would take to ajax-load the panel content too. In dynamicload.module (part of Javascript Tools) there's relevant code. That would enable the loading of content to be placed in the panels without page refreshing.

I've started some preliminary work on fixing up the admin screens to use this tech for panels 2.0, thanks to Ayman giving some lovely code to work with.

So far I've got it dragging panel bits around. I need to get it to save that state, and do a few other nice things (removing the up/down arrows when javascript is on).

One thing I'd like to do -- and I'll happily take expert help on this -- is to change the 'configure' stuff from a collapsible fieldset to more of a lightbox type thing. So when you click configure, it can use more of the screen than just the panel size. (It can be a real drag to click configure on something on the left in the 25/50/25 panel).

After that I can look into using AJAX to add panel pieces. I don't think it should actually be all *that* hard to get that info, but I don't know. Rendering it might be a little more than my javascript skills can currently do, unless I can somehow basically just paste in some HTML provided by the ajax method. Nedjo, do you know? I know you're a lot better with JS than I am.

Attached is my preliminary work, which I'm not ready to check in, even remotely.

Also, see my blog post on angrydonuts for a glimpse into how I envision private panels being implemented.

Earl, the available jQuery methods make fetching data through ajax and appending them delightfully easy. Have a look at the 'ajax' entry in the jQuery api docs, http://jquery.com/api/. Basically all you need to do is feed in a url to fetch content from, then instruct the script to append what's returned on success. Here's a hypothetical example (the 'url' here would need more work so as not to assume clean urls):

$.ajax({
  type: "POST",
  url: "my/path",
  data: "panelid=" + panelId,
  success: function(data){
    // On success, append the returned HTML to the panel's element.
    $('#' + panelid).html(data);
  }
});

Hello,
I have already started work on an API to open up drag drop and sort functionality to other modules. The API would attach javascript information to variables that were passed into, allowing for the drag and drop user interface. Changes could be made, the API would re-sort weights and other position information, and the API would then pass the new values out to be sent to the database by the module.

I've been trying to decide how to handle the incoming information. Specifically, I'm trying to make this function broad enough in its scope that it could be applied to any visual element that drupal outputs. I have thought about have 2 optional variables and one required variable.
The required variable would be the weight of an element, for sort within a single container. The 2 optional variables would capture the region on the page, and a container id within each region.

This is what I would like to ask you about: How does panels differentiate between the panels? Would the system I'm proposing work for developing a drag and drop panels interface? If so, what position information would I need to collect coming in? If not, how could I alter it to make it broader in its functionality?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts. I am most likely going to be submitting this as my proposal for SoC and I'd appreciate any feedback you could give me.

I have been interested in this type of module for quite some time and I was wondering what your current status was. Any idea when it might be ready to use?

/carmi

This feature is currently in Panels 2, but is probably going to disappear for a bit to be replaced by something without dragging (but hopefully just as usable). The drag & drop code we're using is buggy on several browsers and Not Ready For Primetime, though there is some word that one of our jquery experts is interested in writing specialized javascript code for it.

Yea, I think we can call this fixed.