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.

Amazon (and presumably the rest of the book-selling world) now has Drupal's Building Blocks on sale!

To celebrate managing to actually get this book to press, I'll be giving away four signed copies.

The book ended up being long overdue because, mostly, I couldn't manage to prioritize it up enough to get it done.

It took Emma Jane Hogbin to step in and finish a few bits and polish it a little to get this book to actually go to press. It should be printed right before Christmas and will spend a couple of weeks in transit. Amazon says Jan 10, which is probably about right.

Those who have been concerned that there would be no Panels for Drupal 7 can rest a little easier. Today I made alpha releases for both Panels and the Chaos Tool Suite. There's still a few bugs, and there's still a bunch of work left to do, but we're to the point where it seems to be at least basically usable.

Sep 13-15, 8 of us met at the Commerce Guys facility in San Francisco for a 3 day code sprint:

• Me! (Hi there)
• Sam Boyer
• James Gilliland
• Kris Vanderwater
• Jen Lampton
• Jon Skulski

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.

I think the pictures speak for themselves on this one.

Select:

Configure:

Preview:

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.