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.

The beta period is a period where I feel I am going to need a lot of help. There are many outstanding TODO items (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/18765) that I simply won't be able to get to, and the bugs are likely to come fast and furious and I am hopeful to find a few good devs who can help provide solid patches and debugging to get this stuff taken care of.

Finally, there's the UI polishing. Oh the UI polishing. There are people who are going to hate the new workflows, of this I am certain. I will do my best to polish the UI and make the workflows better, but this is going to take a longer amount of time than I've really got, so we're going to launch with the weaker UI and hopefully nail up a nicer one later.

Here are some hilites of the things I really would like people to help work on:

• More content types. There are some obvious content things that could be pulled in, either in Panels itself from core, or put into other modules. Things like the forum containers, for example; having enough forum content could make it possible for Panels to take over the forum section and allow people to do more with the look of the forums.
• Styles. The 'rounded corners' style is the only interesting style we have. I'd love it if some folks would come up with some basic pane decorations. Styles have options and in theory we could implement farbtastic to do color picking and all kinds of stuff, but it'll take some effort. The idea behind color.module is solid but its very specific to themes; but we can take the ideas it used and build our styles with it. This could let a user pick a style, then pick the fonts + sizes and colors that each pane should be.
• An administrative widget. When looking at a panel page, there needs to be an easy way to get information about that page. For example, browse the contexts. Go to the the various edit points for that page. Etc. I've wanted to use admin_menu for this, but I haven't had a chance to figure out how. Maybe it needs to be its own thing. But it'd be very cool if we could have a generalized widget that Panels merely takes advantage of, rather than a Panels specific administrator.
• Better layout and style selectors. Layouts should be categorized. Like content, layout should also be able to offer subtypes. This could allow the 'flexible' type to offer many pre-canned layouts that can be tweaked, and it could also allow administrators to create layouts they want to use, save them, and re-use them easily.

Here are some hilites of what Panels 3 offers:

• A flexible layout builder. Remember that old UI where you had to say '3 columns', then hit update and get a refresh for form gadgets so you could say how wide those columns should be? No more. Now you can do a few clicks, add a column and resize it visually.
• The ability to override specific pages, and provide different output based upon what that page is displaying. This means that you can override the node page and display 'story' nodes one way, 'page' nodes another, 'article' nodes yet a third way, let 'og' nodes have their own panel displays using og panels, and finally have any nodes that are written in arabic display completely differently as well. You could also have nodes written by administrators display differently, or nodes viewed by administrators might display differently as well.
• A redesigned 'add content' modal that's much easier to use. Content in it has been recategorized so that it's more about what the content is and less about where the content comes from.
• Like Views, when editing panel objects, things aren't saved until you're completely done. This is turning out to be both good and bad.
• Layouts and styles can be offered up by themes, as well as modules.

We should be just a few short steps away from being able to have Panels take over the page and replace the blocks system entirely. We won't be there for this release of Panels 3, but maybe if some interested devs step up, we can get there.