One thing panels does well is to put a bunch of unrelated or at least not directly related content in different areas on your page. One thing it doesn’t do well, by itself, is to stripe content across regions.

But what we can do is get Views to do that kind of thing for us. And because Views is not plugin driven, instead of telling the user “Oh you have to theme it” we can provide a plugin that does exactly that. In fact, I’ve decided to try and do away with the “Oh you have to theme it” answer, and created a new project on Drupal, called the Views Bonus Pack where I (and some other people who do a lot of Views work) can put plugins and default views to give the starting user a place to work from as well as a bunch of cool tricks.

The first thing I put in this bonus pack, then, is a simple way to take a single view and spread it out across content regions. I included four variants, and I’m sure more are possible but those four really do the job, and someone with a little bit of PHP knowledge could probably do variants on those four to create other interesting layouts as well.

The easiest way to get an example of this is, at least at the moment, to view the this demo, which is an alternative version of this site’s front page. How did I do this?

1. Install Views, Panels and the Views Bonus Pack.
2. Go to views administration, click ‘add’ on the frontpage view, which takes you to an edit screen.
3. Go to the Page fieldset. Under view type, change it from “Teasers” to one of the panel teasers. I’m using Panels: Teasers, 1 top + 2 columns
4. If you really want this to be your site’s frontpage, go to administer >> settings, open the general set, and change default frontpage to ‘frontpage’.
5. Bask.