Panels and display renderers

Thanks for a quick reply merlin.

So I'll do my best to describe what I have so far. I've forked my own version of panels_nodes module that is pretty much the same, but panels has been abstracted from a specific node type as the ability to create a panel node needs to span across different node types. On the content side the panel content page needs to be exposed to several roles, but each role needs to have different features of the interface available to them. For example, role A needs to be able to move panel panes around, role b also needs to be able to add and remove panel panes, and role A and B should only see a particular category of panel panes to choose from. Finally admins should have the original panel content access.

I'm open to any suggestions you may have to accomplish this in a better manor. The approach at this point was to roll a custom version of panels_renderer_editor.class.php where permissions to controls could be handled

Ok, the info above was a great help. I don't think it would take much to clean up the forked panel nodes module at all. So i would have no problem sharing that back, as I had also planned on doing a little write up on what was done as well for my blog since there isn't alot of documentation on the web about working with display renderers. But, I'll have to wait till im done on this project before i can get to cleaning it up and posting it :)

So i am at a point now where i can override the content page's pipeline and specify whatever renderer that I want. This is working well. And if i look at the pipelines on the node edit page, my pipeline shows up as an option. But the renderer is not getting recognized on the edit page. My suspicion is that something that needs to be included is not there. This conclusion came from getting a call to undefined function panels_get_renderer_pipelines() when I was doing some testing.

Here is what I got so far in my page function for the panel content page where 'custom_editor' is the new display renderer that has been created.

function panels_every_node_edit_content($node) {

    if (!empty($node->panels_every_node['did'])) {
        panels_load_include('common');
        $display = panels_load_display($node->panels_every_node['did']);
        $display->css_id = $node->panels_every_node['css_id'];
        // TODO: Find a way to make sure this can't node_view.
        $display->context = panels_every_node_get_context($node);
        $output = panels_render_display($display, 'custom_editor');
    } else {
        $content_types = panels_common_get_allowed_types('panels_every_node', $display->context);
        $output = panels_edit($display, "node/$node->nid/panel_content", $content_types);

    }
    // Print this with theme('page') so that blocks are disabled while editing a display.
    // This is important because negative margins in common block layouts (i.e, Garland)
    // messes up the drag & drop.
    print theme('page', $output, FALSE);

}

Once again, thank you for your assistance

Well it looks like the problem ended up being in hook_ctools_plugin_directory(). i had if ($module == 'ctools') { when i actually needed if ($module == 'ctools' || $module == 'panels') { so my display renderer is up and going now. Your help has been greatly appreciated, after this project is done i'll post what i have back to this thread.

ok, i might have spoke to soon. It appears that there is an inconcistancy causing a problem with hook_ctools_plugin_directory()

when i use

/*
 * Implementation of hook_ctools_plugin_directory().
 */
function panels_every_node_ctools_plugin_directory($module, $plugin) {
    if ($module == 'ctools') {      
        return 'plugins/' . $plugin;
    }
}

regular panel pages work, but my custom panel content page is broke.

the following:

/*
 * Implementation of hook_ctools_plugin_directory().
 */
function panels_every_node_ctools_plugin_directory($module, $plugin) {
    if ($module == 'ctools' || $module == 'panels') {      
        return 'plugins/' . $plugin;
    }
}

Allows the custom panel content page to render correctly, but panel pages also use the custom editor on their display.

Any suggestions?

ok i figured this out, its my own damn fault. so i apologize for wasting your time on that last one.

here is my fork of the panels_node module that abstracts it from the panels node type. I don't think it could be considered production, but it is functional. The display renderer is hardcoded to the custom one i developed as well. One glaring flaw I noticed however. When using the content pane type "Node content" it creates a double render for anything added by any modules that append data to $node->content in hook_nodeapi.