Drupal Panels¶

Another workhorse of the Drupal modules library is Panels. Like Views Panels is a module I tend to install on most Drupal sites. We have already seen how the layout of a page can be controlled via a combination of your theme and Drupal Blocks, but this approach works well when the blocks are mostly consistent across the site or section of the site. So, for example the blocks approach is good for setting up a site where the left column always contains a navigation menu, and the footer area always contains a consisten set of links. But what about the scenario where you want to layout the content area of the page and perhaps to do this differently on several pages? Your home page might need to contain an area with links to blog posts, an area with links to recent photos and perhaps an area with the block output created by a weather forecast module. Another page might need to show a user’s notifications in one column and a second column containing their direct messages. Although it is possible to use the theming system to create different page templates for each page and to use the blocks system to populate the templates, this approach has 2 major problems:

Writing page templates requires you to write PHP & HTML template files to upload to the server.
Drupal’s method of configuring blocks to be shown only on certain pages is designed to only cope with a small amount of variability between pages. Using this technique to make every page different would simply be a nightmare to manage.

This is where Panels steps in. When combined with the Page Manager module, you can take greater control over the user experience of your website, including:

Create totally custom one-off pages with their own mashup of content
Create page layouts that will be applied when the current page is a certain content type. For example, you could create a “Species Account” content type with it’s own set of fields and corresponding Panels layout.

The iRecord home page is an example of a panel layout.