Creating flexible news page layouts with Panels2

I'm a latecomer to the Panels party. We've been able to use blocks and regions to accommodate our layout needs for our community websites. But as we work on a project to launch two large newspapers on Drupal later this year, we're looking for ways to enable editors to create and manage special page layouts on the fly, as the changing news demands.

That led to Panels, and after spending some time with Panels 2, I'm blown away.

Here's how Panels solves the problem.

Take a look at the layout at right. It's fairly typical of a wireframe for a homepage or section front on a news site, with a header, footer, 300-pixel standard ad stack on the right, and a bunch of varied blocks in the core of the page.

With a conventional approach, you'd break the page into regions, drop blocks into those regions, and be done with it.

To achieve flexibility, you might create multiple layouts and dynamically switch among them by setting a system variable, but you'll run into a hardwired problem with Drupal: Blocks belong to one, and only one, named region. If a variant page layout needs to change the mix, you're stuck.

Panels provides grids that can be dropped into the page core -- the $content variable in page.tpl.php -- that can pull in a mix of node, block, view and arbitrary custom content.

But with Panels 1, you're limited to a fixed set of grids, and they could not hit the target in this wireframe because of the odd spacing you see in the cell toward the top of the content area. You can add grids to your own specifications, but it requires some programming work.

Panels 2 breaks through this barrier by adding yet another layer -- mini panels. A mini panel is just like a regular panel, except for two things: it can be placed inside a regular panel (just like node, block, view and arbitrary content), and you're not limited to the standard provided grids.

Want one, two, three, four rows? Different numbers of columns in each row? Arbitrary widths per column? No problem. No HTML, no CSS, no coding. Just fill out the form.

Now you're cooking.

Panels also lets you designate which blocks and views will be available to editors, solving the "omigod that's cluttered" problem of the admin/build/blocks page. You don't need "administer blocks" privileges to manage panels, either.

And Panels 2 adds a bit of Jquery drag-and-drop goodness to the user interface. Components can be dragged from one cell to another within a grid. They can be temporarily hidden without removing them. And if there's a need to reconfigure a block, that's can be one click away, too.

So Panels 2 neatly solves our flexibility problem. And in doing so, it actually simplifies our site theme development work as well, because a single page template can serve a multitude of needs that otherwise might have required a series of related templates. This will lower our theme HTML/CSS coding costs.

There's one more, unexpected benefit of Panels: It dovetails nicely with a dayparting module we've been developing.

Our dayparting module, originally written by Mike Napier of the Topeka Capital-Journal, will manage a daypart schedule. At configurable points during the 24-hour cycle, it can automatically switch from one prepared homepage layout to another by changing the Drupal front page system variable. Because it will work with Panels pages, editors will be able to tinker and polish the layouts in advance, even preparing arbitrary new presentations for special projects and special days.

We'll be releasing the dayparting module under the GPL soon. We hope to also create some abstracted page templates and eventually an installation profile script that will automate some of the tedious configuration steps associated with building a newspaper website.