Posted by Merlin on Wed Aug 19, 2009 3:35 pm.
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.
Hooray!
Been browsing the documentation, and the new feature set is truly impressive.
Thanks for epic contributions to the community :]
Woo Hoo!!
Good stuff. I'm keen to install it and see what's new :)
congratulations
Terrific news. Thanks for all your hard work - the power of panels now is breathtaking and so easy to use. Variants are wonderful - amongst other things, handling taxonomy terms for different vocabularies is a doddle now.
Drupal MVP for some time to come, I suspect.
So cool! Can't wait to
So cool! Can't wait to install this first thing tomorrow AM!
Great! So you can
Great!
So you can concentrate more on your awesome book!
Congrats with your release
Congrats with your release Merlin. There is a chance I will do a screencast about Panels 3. It depends on how fast I will become productive/understand it an become knowledgable enouth to pass it on. A bit of a chicken and egg problem realy.
Merlin, If you would be introduced to Panels 3 what 5 topics would you like to see discussed in it?
for example :
1. Page Manager
2. Variants
3. ...
4.
5.
This could serve me well to stay focused and give a good intro to Panels 3
Page Manager Variants Making
Page Manager
Variants
Making landing pages
Making story nodes look cool
Making a particular vocabularies look cool
YAY!!! Thanks Earl!!
YAY!!!
Thanks Earl!!
Congratulations
Congratulations on the 3.0 release! I've had a quick look and like what I see. Will post some how-tos once I get my head around the finer points of Variants.
Is 3.0 going to stay stable for some time? (ie. will Drupal 7 see a Panels 4 or just refinements on the 3.x branch.) Just wondering what your plans are from here out.
Once again congratulations and thanks for your awesome contributions to Drupal.
I'll talk about my plans for
I'll talk about my plans for 3.1 but I have no plans for anything called 4.0 for a long time.
Well done, Earl!
This must have been the most anticipated release of any module this year.
I've been working with the new Panels since Panels 2 and with each new release I'm blown away.
Those who only glanced at what Panels 3 can do has only seen the tip of the iceberg.
I will make some time to help with the documents.
Thanks!
We really really appreciate your effort and your kindness to give away the code to the community.
You´re great Earl!
THANKS!!
Matt from GotDrupal already
Matt from GotDrupal already made a screencast :
http://gotdrupal.com/videos/drupal-panels
I still have to check it out but the vids are usaualy great.
How to help with the documnetation
Wonderful stuff this panels 3, but there's quite a bit to learn and information is scattered everywhere. So how do I go about this. I do have edit rights from helping with documentation on XML Site Map. Let me know.
Is this possible?
This looks out of this world. Great work!
I'm wondering if this will solve a problem I'm facing, or if I can just do this with something like Contemplate:
I'm creating Book Pages with quite a lot of detail on them and I'd like to be able to have each page show a tab or carousel with a complex version and a simple version. I guess I could do this via view carousel, but I don't want to have to create a view for each node that I do this on, as it will be most nodes.
So far, I'm thinking of having the "simple" version as a CCK field, but want the node to always show that hidden, as a selectable option instead of the detailed page.
At the moment, it looks like Panels 3 could handle this, but I'm not sure where to start. Any help anyone could offer would be appreciated.
ctools is amazing module!
ctools is amazing module!
provide additional selection rules
i am wondering if there is a way for your custom module to provide additional selection rule options for variants. for instance, i use domain access and it would be awesome to have a selection rule for the active domain. how to approach this? i was looking at node_type.inc which i guess provides the node type selection rule, but i am not really a black belt kitten slayer and i got stuck with it.
is there any documentation available on this topic?
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