Currently the Drupal pager system is an interesting look into some of the past decisions in Drupal design. The system is actually a very powerful paging system that can handle multiple pagers on the same page that act completely independently. However, it is also a kind of messy piece of code that stores a lot of its data in very obscure globals in formats that don't make sense. It is difficult to document and even more difficult to understand from the outside.

It's that time, and Panels 3 is finally getting close to beta. I have two major pieces of work to finish up (a proper preview widget and the upgrade path from Panels 5) and then I will release the first beta. I expect the first beta to be relatively unstable in terms of the features being buggy, but finally the API should be more or less stable, other than last minute fixes to get everything consistent with each other.