The Panels In-Place Editor was a fantastic piece of functionality added to the Panels library, funded by Chapter Three (thanks!!!) and implemented almost entirely by Sam Boyer. This feature allows users to designate Panels of various types as editable in-place. This means that users with privileges are given a button at the bottom of the page which allows them to dynamically add, remove and rearrange content on that page. It's much more limited than the typical back end editor, but is much more usable by content managers who are focusing highly on the content.

The modules page in Drupal has always been one of a handfull of pages that I consider flat out embarassing for us.

In the old days, i.e, back in Drupal 4.6 when I started, it was nothing more than a collection of modules, ordered alphabetically, with checkboxes. Drupal was small enough that this wasn't really that much of a problem. And then modules like ecommerce and CCK came along with these large collections of modules and nobody could find anything.

Today, I merged the working branch for the Views 3 UX project into the 7.x-3.x branch of Views. This means that, as of midnight, GMT, everyone now has access to the completely retooled UI for Views, that was spearheaded by Acquia and specifically led by Jeff Noyes and Chris Brookins.

Note: To have access to this, please use the latest CTools -dev or latest CTools release. Some things in CTools had to be updated to support Views' use of export.inc.

There's currently a discussion going around twitter about the idea of a Drupal App Store. Now, I don't actually want to talk about the merits and problems of the idea itself. From what I can tell, what this really is meant to be is a conversation starter for a presentation that Robert Douglass is giving in Brussels. And the idea of an App Store has some very interesting ramifications, some positive, and some negative.

But as I said, that's not what I need to get off my chest.

These are my slides and example module for my BADCamp presentation tomorrow.

Thanks to the generosity of Chapter 3 and Commerce Guys, we will be holding a code sprint in San Francisco starting tomorrow (Sep 13) to upgrade CTools and Panels to D7. My sincere hope is that we can get to the point where there is an alpha release by the end of it, but even if we cant we should be able to produce something that dedicated users can start to test.

The last few weeks have seen an intense flurry of work on the Panels suite of modules. Today I've rolled releases of the Panels 3.7, CTools 1.7, Panels Everywhere 1.1 and a tiny bugfix release for Tinsel 1.1. This has created a massive chunk of new features that we're hoping will push Panels even more into the mainstream by seriously extending the power available to site builders, particularly in terms of giving site administrators better options for doing their jobs without having to worry about details they've taken care of.

I'm looking for someone with solid CSS skills and good photoshop skills and a strong understanding of modular design to help fix and create more style bases for Panels Stylizer. If you haven't seen it, the Stylizer lets you create re-usable styles for your panel panes and regions directly in the UI. Behind the scenes it will do image recoloring and slicing to get exactly what it needs, and cache those images in the files directory so they can be used. Right now I ship with a usable but not exactly perfectly rounded shadow box.

After over four years of working with Drupal, I have finally reached one of the major goals that I have envisioned from the beginning. Today I released the first beta of Panels Everywhere, a new module that works with Panels and Page Manager that allows you to never use the block management system again.

Ahh, you gotta love IRC. Allow me to share a short edited snippet. IP addresses have been removed as well as some comments by people that are not really relevant to the conversation. The best part are the /whois results.

I'm not in any way upset about this. I think this is funny, and felt like sharing.


[20:01] *** kinesis (n=k@xx.xx.xx.xx) joined
[20:01] drupal vs joomla and why
[20:03] kinesis http://www.whitehouse.gov/
[20:03] This is an IRC chat, not google.
[20:03] thats nice