One Week With Panels 2 Beta 3

by | Apr 15, 2008 | Uncategorized

What follows is a slightly edited stream of emails i sent to one of our internal lists as I dove into Panels 2 Beta 3 last week. I hope to glean a more concise set of instructions and recommendations from this experience, but figured in the spirit of “Release early, release often” I would post this just in time for the end of Module Monday. If you are familiar with Panels 2 Beta 3, you will see that I too became familiar with it over the span of these few days that I was working with it. So in the first entry when you find yourself thinking “Dude you need to add a panel view first!” be patient, I get to it. I think this speaks to some usability improvements that could be made, or documentation improvements, especially for folks who have already been using earlier versions of panels. 4/7 9:45pm Argument handling functionality in Panels 2 Beta 3 has seriously changed since earlier versions with the addition of the context “tab” in panels configuration. In earlier versions of panels (panels 1, and 2 beta 1) you could manually add an argument into the pane settings, thus you could use the same view in 3 panes in one panel and pass a different argument through each time. for example you could have a product view 3 times in the same panel and pass the arguments book, video, clothing thus economizing on how many panels you have. Similarly you could manually add a specific taxonomy term id or name as an argument to pass through to the views that make...

Training Six Hour Startup On Drupal

by | Apr 7, 2008 | Uncategorized

Yesterday Robin Barre and I spent some time down at the Saturday House in SoDo (in Seattle) training folks involved in Six Hour Startup on Drupal for an upcoming project called SiteFinder. SiteFinder will be a community maintained listing service for available office space geared towards startups. I spent about two hours presenting an introduction to Drupal and then some details about how to configure Drupal, use CCK, Views and Panels, taxonomy and some other necessary modules. Robin then presented an intro to module building, which covered the hooks system, some api details and other tips and...