As developers and site builders who spend their days building with Drupal Jared Stoneberg and Mike Keran want to share how the Panels tool chain makes every day working with Drupal better. We will spend this session explaining how we use Panels and the associated tools to build better websites. We will focus on explaining the tools we like to use and how to use them. If you have never tried using the Panels approach to building a Drupal site and attend our session you will leave with a good idea of how to dive in and try it out. This session will be geared towards intermediate site builders and developers but we will spend a small amount of time looking at some of the more advanced developer tools in the packages.

1. Practical Panels
Mike Keran and Jared Stoneberg

2. Who We Are
Mike Keran
Freelance Drupal developer, site
builder and reluctant themer
drupal.org: mikeker
web: www.MikeKeran.com
twitter: @mikekeran <crickets chirping>

3. Who We Are
Jared Stoneberg
Partner, Number 10 Web Company
drupal.org: rocksoup
web: www.number10webcompany.com
twitter: @rock_soup

4. ● The smartest people in the room
● The world’s greatest panels experts
● The only people who have tried to solve these problems
● The only people you should hear from
Who We Aren’t

5. What We are Going to Talk About
● General Concepts - Variants, Selection Rules,
Contexts
● Mini Panels
● Custom Content Panes
● Views Panes
● Panels Extensions we love: Fieldable Panels Panes,
FAPE, Custom Panels Layouts

6. What we won’t be talking about
● Comparisons with other systems
● Moving quickly through the beginner stuff so we have
time for the intermediate and advanced
● “Best” practices… because these are “our” practices

7. General Concepts
● This is a CTools system; its cousin is Views
● Panels replaces Drupal core’s block module
● Provides an easy to use layout builder
● Pluggable! Use custom code to make your own layouts,
contexts, selection criteria, etc.

8. Just a few terms...

15. Adding content

16. Extending Panels

17. Mini Panels
● Despite the different UI, it’s just a panel…
● … that you can put into another panel’s panes
● Perfect for headers/footers/sidebars
● Can receive context from Panel

18. Views Panes
● Adds a new display plugin to Views
● Override common settings on a pane-by-pane basis
● Panel context can be passed as a contextual filter

19. Custom Content Panes
● Easily insert custom content in a pane
● Limitations:
○ Content is saved with panel config
○ Can be difficult to restrict access
○ Can’t reuse panes
○ Hard to undo changes

20. Fieldable Panels Panes (FPP)
● Fieldable: Brings the FieldAPI to a custom content pane
○ (Along with all that is good about the FieldAPI:
display settings, revisions, widgets)
● Only the config gets stored in code; content remains in
the database
● Pane content is (optionally) reusable
● But it also has some limitations...

21. Custom Panels Layouts

22. Field API Pane Editor (FAPE)

23. Panels Extra Styles

24. Panels Existing Pages
● Page Manager runs into problems when you try to use it
with paths that are already “owned” by someone else,
like Core or Commerce
● PM Existing Pages allows you to wrestle those paths
back

25. Exportables, Features and UUIDs
https://drupal.org/node/1277908

26. Demo
copy of demo site at
github.com/rocksoup/panelsdemo

27. Questions?