Apparently I've been sort of ignoring an increased friction between Drupal designers and developers the last few days. Not that I don't know it's there, I'm right up in the forefront of that friction, feeling fairly regularly told what to do by people who I feel aren't fully informed as to why I created things the way I did. And most often I don't react well to this, and I cause more friction than I really should. But this isn't just about me. That friction is there and it's all around.

Heading to the airport to go to Paris shortly. DrupalCon is Sep 1-5 and it'll be fun to see a bit of Paris before that.

For the next two weeks expect no or next to no activity from me in any of my issue queues. For a week or two after we come back, don't expect much better. Post-trip trauma is always fun.

That's right. Panels 2 never managed to get a 2.0 release, it got caught up in rcs and brokenness that was unfixable. Panels 3, however, has managed to duck that curse, and it is now official. Panels 3 is released. It really needs CTools 1.0.

Panels 3.0: http://drupal.org/node/554226
CTools 1.0: http://drupal.org/node/554222

Panels 3 has seen radical changes since Panels 2, and is a great deal more powerful, easier to use and we think you will like it a lot.

Please understand that the upgrade from Panels 1 or 2 to Panels 3 is a little bumpy. Not everything upgrades perfectly. Some people have had to uninstall and reinstall to make it work. Some of the back and forth during the betas and rcs caused irreparably messed up data that does not carry forward properly. I apologize for this. BACK UP BEFORE YOU UPGRADE.. If you do not read these release notes, and do not back up, please do not post issues. =)

The best way to use Panels is to pair it with the Page Manager from the Chaos Tools Suite, and use its interface for creating panel pages. This completely replaces the Panels Pages module from Panels 2. If you used an earlier beta version, the Page Manager used to be known as delegator. If you are upgrading from Panels 2, and the CTools module is already in the tree but not enabled, it will be automatically enabled for you. This is the best way to upgrade from Panels 2. Please ensure that you are using CTools 1.0 alongside this, and not a beta version! Earlier versions of CTools will not work with Panels 3.0!

Page Manager introduces the concept of Variants which are different ways that a page can be displayed. For many uses, you will have only one variant. However, if you want a page to look different based upon the data being displayed (for example, you want story nodes displayed differently from article nodes), or permissions of the user (you may want an administrator to see something different from a regular user, or a logged in user to see something different from a logged out user) then you will add additional variants to a page. You will use the selection rules to determine which variant a user sees. Remember that the first variant that passes the selection rules will be used, so be sure to put the most specific rules first and the more general rules later. You can put a variant with no rules at all last and it will serve as a default.

There is a real need for tutorials, screencasts and documentation for this system to be written. It's at this point that I'm really looking to the community to provide help. My own motivation to write this stuff is fairly low, and I know there are writers out there who use this stuff who can help. Please participate! Documentation is a great way to give back to the community in return for software, and requires very little (sometimes no!) coding knowledge at all.

This is a call to translators. If you're interested in translating Panels and or CTools, I am going to do a full release by the middle of next week. Any translation work you want to go out with this release should be checked into CVS by then!

Panels has only one translation and it's very old, so it is probably more or less useless. CTools has no translations at all (and I am not surprised by this).