Kars-T's sandbox: Teaser Pane

A panel pane that uses a View to aggregate its content but lets the user override it's content by a specific pick. With scheduling, cache and improved UI.
For a typical front-page or any landing page we need various teasers placements. A content manager wants to choose what appears where by a schedule. In Drupal we can achieve this by the use of Views and Panels with different kinds of panes. With views we have the problem that you can't easily say “At position three we want specific node” and change the build mode for each item. With a node pane this is very easy but there is no view as a base so we get some kind of automatic fall back if nothing specific is selected. This module is setup to fill this gap.

User Stories

• We want a landing page that provides different teaser placements.
• A teaser placement on a landing page has to display a selected node.
• The teaser pane has to display the node in a specific build mode.
• You can select multiple nodes and schedule them.
• If no node was selected for a teaser pane a View selected view has to be executed and the we use the next found item for the teaser placement.
• There must not be duplicated nodes if we use the view.
• A content manager should see teaser placements that contain nothing.
• Show the status of the teaser placement near the placement and provide use full links.

Implementation

• Create a “content_type” ctools plug-in to be used with panels.
• The plug-in has settings for “Build Mode” and “Fall back View”.
• Use Contextual Links for a kind of “in-place editing” feature.
• If a pane without a placement calls the fall back View cache it and iterate through it.
• Page to select nodes, their build modes and a start time. So you have to delete any node placements to get data from the fall back View. The latest scheduled node will always show otherwise.
• Grants for accessing and changing the placements.