Like many other content management systems, Drupal is built on PHP. With PHP, you can dig in and make it do whatever you want. Likewise, you can dig into Drupal and make it do most everything you want - well, almost. If you're not afraid of writing PHP code, then the sky's the limit. If you're limited by the time and desire to learn PHP, then Panels is likely the way to go!
If you're seeking a high degree of control, regarding the individual building blocks which make up the output of your Drupal site, you can choose one or more of the following. In order of complexity (and decreasing silliness) you can A) generate an XSLT parsing system to re-render what was already rendered by Drupal from your own custom module built to output custom XML code, B) become a Drupal theming master (a topic for another video series) or C) use Panels and be done with it.
My suggestion is to go with 'C' and be done with it. Hopefully, this video will provide you with the head start you're looking for when working with the Panels module.
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Thanks for the tutorial
The video has some kind of problems.
The video will stick at around 26:xx mins
Sorry about the audio glitch in the video. I'm away from my production computer right now but will fix it as soon as I can. (this is not a promotional stunt - but if you'd like to be notified then follow @gotdrupal on twitter).
UPDATE: It should be fixed now (8/25/09 10:12 AM PDT)
Thanks for the lesson, everything is clear and simple
thanks for the great vid. One question though - if I am trying to insert variables into a pane like I would in a template file (e.g. $node->path for the path to the node) I get no output when I print this in a php code snippet.
Congrats to Matt for the comprehensive take on the Panels 3 module.
While Panels 3 is awesome, it may not be for everyone (or every site). The video does a great job in letting people dive into the details of managing Panels 3 for their site-layout needs.
To supplement the idea behind why (or why not) you should use Panels, I suggest to watch Rob's podcast on the same topic.
I hope to get addicted to Panels 3. Unfortunately, Composite Layout stole my heart.
Thanks for the video Matt. Keep rockin'
Composite Layout rocks indeed. I like its ease of use and the flexibility. I think this can be described as "Panels little brother". For nodelevel alterations I use composite but for the bigger picture stuff Panels is the way to go. Exploring Mini-Panels and Panel-Nodes might change my mind and I probably become an All-Panels guy. But especially for newbs Composite Layout may be easier.
@Matt
Thanks for another great tutorial. I predict that this one will become a key reference for Panels 3 beginners.
Nice video, thanks.
Can anyone tell me what is the module for the Admin dropdown menu??
Try this link for admin drop down menu:
http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu
NO! Not a SWF! No controls, no timeline information, harder to save.
Your old format was great. If something more compatible is desired how about a straight mp4 file?
Love the content, don't love the format.
Well, now it's a .mov file again. Weird but thanks!
Because of the number of people without QuickTime installed, I decided to use the (flash) Flowplayer for delivering the file. The file, however, is still in the same format. You can click on the download link to play using QuickTime.
Thanks for sharing this video with us. i like your post and all you share with us is up to-date and quite informative, i would like to bookmark the page so i can come here again to read you, Great Video, Types Of Events as you have done a wonderful job.
Great video, I'm learning Drupal and modules like these makes me want to go forward with it.
In the video you mention about panels that take the whole page, how is that possible? I'm trying to find a way to do it but to be honest I don't even know which terms to search for.
I'm trying to change the Garland theme but I would like to change how the content is distributed in it not the style... and if I can do it panels being able to control the left and right panel will be perfect.
Thanks in advance :)
Panels generates its HTML result into the $content variable. In order to control what the whole page looks like you need to modify page.tpl.php.
However, better than that, you can create a unique page type template based on the content type being viewed. This would look something like page-video.tpl.php. I shot a video about unique pages per content type which should help you out with that.
I have been using Panels on Drupal 5.x (Panels 5.x-1.2) for about a year, great for on the fly page organization. Staring a site with Drupal 6.x & Panels 3.x required some re-orientation. This video helped get the terms and use figured out. Thanks, John Blue
Bravo!
"Panels 101..."
Long overdue. Should be required viewing for anyone downloading Panels for the first time.
Thank You
bob
This tutorial was not terribly helpful to me. Problems:
I'm sure some people would like to see a demonstration of the flexible layout. For a module that is not supposed to require any understanding of theming, the flexible option certainly DOES require an understanding of theming jargon like "region".
I'm really not trying to be mean, but working with an outline might help, too. There were a lot of "in terms of...." place holders thrown around.
it will be more helpful to go through a simple example of creating a panel ( and more complex ones) and so on, than explaining just the features only
from your video, I still don't understand what 's a variant and context is .
thanks
HI Matt,
thanks for the great vid. One question though - if I am trying to insert variables into a pane like I would in a template file (e.g. $node->path for the path to the node) I get no output when I print this in a php code snippet.
Why is that? is there anything I forgot? Maybe you could do an advanced panels video, would be supremely useful!
Martin
Matt I've been digging around for over 6 months looking and learning about Drupal. I have to tell you that you have the best tutorials out there. Thanks for the great production and hard work you put in so that we can enjoy learning. Keep it up. The best to you.
Hey, Matt
Thanks for adding all these videos, especially this one! It's a great overview of the panels module. I'm a designer / front-end guy, so this is all deep stuff to me, but I'm experimenting with panels and hopefully this will allow me to skip the PHP side of theming (maybe... :) ). Anywho, watched a couple videos so far and just wanted to pop in and say thanks!
Hi Matt,
Thanks for this tutorial! It has been a month I discovered Drupal, and I just can't stop exploring all the stuff it can do! For me, this panels module is really a revolution, as I'm a designer, and I'm not to much into diving in code (even if I'm doing it for 8 years now...)
I was still wondering about 2 things. Is a website built with panels more heavier, and less reactive than a website themed with a Genesis or Zen starter theme? And also, what is the difference between panels and skinr (it seems skinr need some special Css framework like Genesis, but I just don't get it all...)
Anyway, thanks again!
Pierre
Really informative video tutorial ... Thank you very much!
But I'm still not sure if I really need (wanna use) Panels for structuring/theming of the output of my page or if I just should use theming of Views.
I'm also not sure how heavy Panels affect the performance of the site. does somebody have any experience about that.
Any module you add to your Drupal site is going to add a certain amount of 'weight' - plain and simple: you're adding more bytes. This could be weight in terms of only affecting logged in users who are admins or it could be any anonymous user who simply views any single page.
For most admin related modules, you don't have to worry much unless you have a lot of authenticated users and then you need to understand the inner workings and what the module is doing. However, the ultimate output of each page in Drupal is affected by any 'weight' which is added.
Since panels is designed to drive the ultimate output, yes, it will affect performance. While Earl makes a lot of effort to optimize his caching strategies, performance always boils down to multiple factors. Hardware, software, caching and code efficiency.
If you're building something that won't get a ton of traffic, let's arbitrarily use 1,000 to 2,000 unique visits a day, then using Panels is just fine. You can use an opcode cache like APC and the Boost module and you'll get a lot of milage. Of course this depends on your hardware. A 256MB slice from Slicehost would likely choke, because of hits to the disk.
The rule of thumb is this; You want as much of your site to be served from memory as possible. If it has to come from disk, you want the web server to make as few trips as possible. Boost does this by making a single static HTML page for your Drupal pages (I'll do a video about Boost).
If you're not afraid to do the theming, then you're always going to run more trim than using something like Panels.
Myself, I use theming because I know how and can replicate what Panels provides. Of course, that comes at the very real cost of time and effort. If I was throwing something up for a friend or small business, I would likely go with Panels because your implementation cost is quite low - you just need to be aware of how to optimize the site.
If you're on a shared host and they don't run APC or equivalent then your authenticated users will run slower. If most of the traffic is anonymous and you install the Boost module - then heck, save the time and go Panels!
If you're reading this, and you know about memcached and using a reverse proxy then you know I don't need to explain what those are and how they're more for sites that get hundreds of thousands of unique visits per day.
Hope that helps!
Matt
Great video! Thanks!!!
It's not the first video i see from you. It makes me easier to understand other modules in Drupal, so i preciate your guide.
I think this waste time to do something like this and everyone needs money to live so between the circumstances it's very good.
The trouble it's that sometimes it doesn't cover all we need and it's not free because our experience and knowledge worth.
I hope that everyone understand this mind.
Thanks !!
Hello,
I'm trying to override the node/add using Panels 3 but I can't figure out how. I did enable the system's node add/edit, created a variant, used the selection rules because I want to override a specific content type. I didn't fiddle with the contexts (don't understand them really). Don't know if they have anything to do for the node/add not to work. Can you help me out as in how to configure it properly in order to override the node/add and not just node edit?
Also, how can you specific cck fields in node/add?
Thx in advance
Tks guy, for this tuto!!!
Thank you very much for this great tutorial: it helps me a lot!
Thanks for the tutorial! Finally, an easy to understand tutorial on using the intimidating panels3 module. I was looking all over the place for any help in explaining how to get organic groups to be shown in a panels page. Specifically, I would like to link to OG from my homepage to a page that shows group details and a group directory of OG. Basically contain everything in a separate page for OG. I setup a new panels page called "Groups" and then linked it to the URL = "www.example.com/groups" I can go to the panels page, but even after adding the group details block to a region, it doesn't display on the page. In fact, any block associated with OG isn't display except for the view called "og". Could anyone steer me in the right direction? I have been banging my head for hours and it is starting to hurt... Cheers!
Matt,
It is incredible how you waste a whole half hour without saying anything of value.
In fact, most of your videos are just as useless.
Regards,
Peter
Peter,
Based on all the comments each video has, I would completely disagree with you. I am curious:
Here's to a great new year with a more positive outlook...or, maybe not. Matt's video's have taught me a ton, and I have been a PHP developer since 1997.
Cheers,
Erik Boles
http://ErikBoles.com
http://twitter.com/ErikBoles
I've always been puzzled by comments which point out how they don't like my stuff. I would think that if you didn't like it, you wouldn't watch it - sort of like a TV show. But, it's a big planet and to each his own.
Thanks for the support and to anyone else who gets value from my content!
Matt
merci, c'est tres utile
I agree wih your opinion. But dont say it like that its not fair. Matt spend a lot of time for this video. I recommend next time a short 5 minute video of just the key steps.
Despite that, i included now panels on this page: Panels Page
/agree with Peter. There's a whole lot of arm-waving and "don't get confused by Panels/Pages" blah blah blah, without any clear structure or useful presentation. It's basically "watch me click around the interface and try to explain it in general terms while presenting this pre-built simplistic example that's only marginally helpful."
A more useful video would've walked through a use case (e.g. I need to make a panel to display my Gizmo content type), been concise (e.g. walked through a couple of times before hitting the record button to eliminate errors like the CTools one in the first few minutes), and featured less editorializing (e.g. "if you need relationships, a really advanced feature", "power users PHP") and more exercise of functionality.
The most useful bit of this video was selection rules, which took all of 2 minutes.
Beginners who are easily impressed by clicking around screens and proof of functionality may find this useful. Experienced Drupal users who're just trying to learn how to use Panels to make their lives easier will spend more than 15 minutes tearing their hair out saying "why don't you get to the point?!?!"
Each video should have a clear target audience ("Beginner" = Beginner to Drupal or beginner to Panels?), a clear set of goals (not "in this video I'm going to try real hard to talk about a bunch of stuff and hope you won't be confused"), and a modular, logical progression.
Finally, IM!HO, it's a lot more useful to have 6 short 5 minute videos (e.g. "Here's how to install Panels"->"Creating your first panel"->"Working with variants"->...) that feature a concise but clear discussion of a particular aspect of panels, than a 30 minute video that tries to talk highly about everything and accomplishes little.
Great tutorial! Thanks for your help!
Thanks for the video. Keep up the good work on this site!
Just another vote of thanks for a well presented and informative video!
Good Tutorial, Matt, thank you for all the work you give to the Drupal community. It's people like you that have brought this so far in so little time. (ignore the 'haters')
Best, Kevin
Thank you!!! Your video was very useful for me!!!
Obviously this video is very nice, but what i personally recomment is that you come more to the point. For example this video is about half an hour. Maybe you can make a short version of it? Just showing very shortly one example what you can do with Panels. Because i personally wanted at the beginning a more "come to the point" way.
well this is the first time ever that i am posting a comment after using any of the open source thing :)
it was so great,,, i mean,,, i was able to solve the issue that i was facing and spent continuous 8 hours to understand them but his 30 mins video made it a glass of water :D
thnx Matt,,,,
I use this piece of open source for my site: http://dinamicsoft.org
I hope that will be no problem in the future!
Thanks!
I'm new to panels and trying to understand the "Selection Rules". I'm running "Panels 6.x-3.3". Can anyone link me to document details on how to create the rules? These are the only option I have in this version and I would like also to have the definition of each option and how to use them:
Context exists
PHP Code
String: comparison
String: length
User: language
User: permission
User: role
Thanks!
Thanks!
I just started with Drupal and have been reading a lot of tutorials and watching a lot of podcast and this is maybe the best site for a beginner like me. Keep up the good work!
I can understand that some people would like shorter videos but in the other hand there is also a point about learning process. The information sinks in a different way when the presenting is not rushed and when you actually see how to do it. That's why many of us like podcast. If you are really in a hurry, you should maybe go to a text tutorial ( you can read as fast as you like).
It is true that all of the videos are not that structured but as already pointed out these videos are not by all means complete guides but merely introductions. And consider also that almost all people doing podcast use their spare time for that. I can understand very well that people have something better to do than script podcasts. I take five casual podcast any day instead of one super perfect one. You have to go through many sources of information anyway.
Thank you Matt for taking the time to teach us!
--E
"The information sinks in a different way when the presenting is not rushed and when you actually see how to do it. That's why many of us like podcast."
There's a difference between "not being rushed so you can actually see how to do it" and taking a really long time to do something that only takes a couple of seconds while saying things that aren't entirely useful.
"I take five casual podcast any day instead of one super perfect one"
If the point of these podcasts is to teach, then the creator must answer an important question:
When you're trying to learn something, would you rather have someone rambling on for half-an-hour on about a variety of things tangentially related to the topic of discussion, or a focused lesson?
Hmm great video. I really like it. Thank you for sharing.
Great Videos | Music Video Codes | Video Ipod
Thanks for the tutorial. Drupal's a wonderful tool.