(For more resources on Drupal, see here.)
Drupal Panels are distinct pieces of rectangular content that create a custom layout of the page—where different Panels are more visible and presentable as a structured web page. Panels is a freely-distributed, open source module developed for Drupal 6. With Panels, you can display various content in a customizable grid layout on one page. Each page created by Panels can include a unique structure and content. Using the drag-and-drop user interface, you select a design for the layout and position various kinds of content (or add custom content) within that layout.
Panels integrates with other Drupal modules like Views and CCK. Permissions, deciding which users can view which elements, are also integrated into Panels. You can even override system pages such as the display of keywords (taxonomy) and individual content pages (nodes).
In the next section, we will see what the Panels can actually do, as defined on drupal.org: http://drupal.org/project/panels.
Basically, Panels will help you to arrange a large content on a single page. While Panels can be used to arrange a lot of content on a single page, it is equally useful for small amounts of related content and/or teasers. Panels support styles, which control how individual content’s panes, regions within a Panel, and the entire Panels will be rendered. While Panels ship with few styles, styles can be provided as plugins by modules, as well as by themes:
A cache mechanism can be defined for each pane or region with the Panel page. Simple caching is a time-based cache. This is a hard limit, and once cached, it will remain that way until the time limit expires. If “arguments” are selected, this content will be cached per individual argument to the entire display; if “contexts” are selected, this content will be cached per unique context in the pane or display; if “neither”, there will be only one cache for this pane.
Shown in the previous screenshot is one of the example sites that use Panels 3 for their home page (http://concernfast.org). The home page is built using custom Panels 3 layout with a couple of dedicated Content types that are used to build nodes to drop into the various Panels areas. The case study can be found at: http://drupal.org/node/629860.
Panels arrange your site content into an easy navigational pattern, which can be clearly seen in the following screenshot.
There are several terms often used within Panels that administrators should become familiar with as we will be using the same throughout the recipes. The common terms in Panels are:
We will now set up Ctools, which is required for Panels. “Chaos tools” is a centralized library, which is used by the most powerful modules of Drupal Panels and views. Most functions in Panels are inherited from the chaos library.
Download the Panels modules for the Drupal website: http://drupal.org/project/Panels
You would need Ctools as a dependency module, which can be downloaded from: http://drupal.org/project/ctools
Chaos tools suite includes the following tools that form the base of the Panels module. You do not need to go into the details of it to use Panels but it is good to know what it includes. This is the powerhouse that makes Panels the most efficient tool to design complex layouts:
Now, we have our Panels UI ready to generate layouts. We will discuss each of them in the following recipes.
The Panels dashboard will help you to generate the layouts for Drupal with ease.
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