Lecture on using the Panels module and making the home page.

1. Introduction to Drupal 7
Session 6.1
Panels
Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 1

2. Agenda
• What is Panels and when to use
• Common uses – home page
• Administration overviews
• Case study – making the home page
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3. Panels
• Another very popular module in the category of Views
and Chaos Tools
• It makes website builders’ lives easier, making it
possible to configure blocks in different layouts with
drag and drop
• Panels are good to use when you have blocks which
need to take contextual information
• Panels are also good for starters, as they give lots of
options for styling and layout configurations
• Panels is well integrated with Views and OG
• Can be exported in Features
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4. Panels notes
• If you’re good front-end developer, you might
want to avoid panels – they generate a lot of
markup
• If you’re good developer, you might also want to
avoid using panels, as they tend to make more
unneeded queries and make not so good
performance as without panels
• If you don’t need contextual information in
blocks, and you’re good with blocks
management, try using regions instead of panels
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5. Creating your home page
• Download and install Panels module
• Turn on the Panels and the Panels in-place editor
• Turn on the Pages Manager too to manage the Panels Pages
through an UI
• Click “Create a new page”
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6. Creating your home page
• Administrative title: Home page
• Machine name: home_page
• Path: /home
• Leave the rest in default configurations and go on
• Select Flexible Builders from Builders category
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7. Creating your home page
• Administrative title for the variant: Home page
• Renderer: In-Place Editor
• Title type: No title
• Click Finish and we’ll edit the panel after that
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8. Creating your home page
• We want to split the panel into 3 regions: 1 top and 2 underneath
• So, we click on Show layout designer to be able to edit the layout
• On the Column, click to add a row to the bottom
• Use the Regions option
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9. Creating your home page
• On the new Row click and select to add a new region
• Name the region Left and set it to be Fluid width
• Repeat the step to add a Right region to the right
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10. Your new layout
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11. Placing content in the regions
• Click on the small wheel and click Add content
• Select a block of your choice, i.e. Welcome to the website custom block
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12. Placing content in the regions
• Repeat the steps for the other 2 regions
• Place the views block for latest news
• Place other (custom) block of your choice
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13. Few tweaks on your home page
• There will some left blocks on your home page
you might not need any more
– The navigation menu block
– The manually turned on block for latest news
– You can turn them off now
• Go to admin/config/system/site-information
• Set default front page value to ‘home’ (this is
the path we have to our panel)
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14. Your new home page with panels
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15. Saving your work into a feature
• Go to admin/structure/features/create
• Enter a name for the feature, i.e. Home page
panels
• Enter a description, i.e. 2 custom blocks and 1
view block for home page
• From the components, select Page manager:
page_manager_pages to see your panel page,
select the Home page panel page
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16. Home page panel feature
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17. Time for questions
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18. Contacts
Kalin Chernev
– E: kalata@shtrak.eu
– T: twitter.com/kalinchernev
– U: http://shtrak.eu/kalata
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