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Panels - Today, and the Future

sdboyer's picture
Submitted by sdboyer on Fri, 07/18/2008 - 18:42.

Session recording

Attached files

Placement
Session time: 
08/27/2008 - 11:00 - 08/27/2008 - 12:00
Conference booklet summary and bio
Article for conference booklet: 
Panels2 is a powerful engine for marshaling and organizing your website and its content. It can stitch together disparate data from all over your site (or even outside it) into a consistent and coherent presentation for your end user - and it can do it all via a drag-and-drop UI. We'll start the session by looking at some examples of what that means, both for individual drupal modules and building out whole sites. But really, that's all old news. Interesting, but still old. So for the second half of the session, the focus will be on future plans for Panels. In other words, we'll talk about Panels3. Details will be revealed in the session, and we'll make sure to reserve some time towards the end for comments and ideas. We're still very much in the planning stage with Panels3, so it'll be a great time to make your thoughts known.
Bios for conference booklet: 
Sam started working with Drupal in late 2007, and joined Earl Miles (merlinofchaos) as co-maintainer of Panels at the beginning of March 2008. He lives in the States in Chicago, IL, where he works two days a week for Palantir.net.

Overview

Over the past few months, we've seen a number of major drupal site rollouts that make extensive use of Panels2 (See, for example, http://drupal.org/node/241344 and http://drupal.org/node/242993). We've also seen a few modules implement the Panels API in rather different ways - most notably, Advanced Profile Kit and Organic Groups Panels - that hint at how flexible Panels can be.

We'll start this session by highlighting these different Panels implementations and providing a birds-eye view of how Panels' moving parts work. We want to make sure attendees have a good sense of what Panels2 can do now - because the second half of the presentation is all about the future of Panels - otherwise known as Panels3.

Panels3 isn't so much about changing the data model (that part already works pretty well) as changing the API and interface. One good way to think about this difference is to consider Panels2's limitations on who can use it. Right now, it's very difficult to scale down the power of Panels to a level that's appropriate for normal users. Panels3 aims to break down that barrier. We'll spend the remainder of the session overviewing some of the current plans for how Panels3 might do that, as well as noting attendee suggestions for some of the large-scale directions we might consider.

Agenda

* Briefly overview Panels2 to bring everyone up to speed on the most recent developments.
* Provide some concrete examples of ways that the Panels API is currently being implemented.
* Present some of the current plans for the future development of Panels
* Gather participant reactions to the proposed ideas, and take general input on possible directions to go as well

Goals

Participants should expect to leave the session with a grasp of Panels' capabilities in the present, and a sense of what to expect in the future.

Resources

None needed. Just bring yourself!

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nir's picture

Links here - where?

Submitted by nir on Sat, 07/19/2008 - 01:15.

You wrote (links here) for some sites, but the link did not really appear. Can you fix? I guess that the links were filtered.
10x

sdboyer's picture

Ahh yes - sorry!

Submitted by sdboyer on Sun, 07/20/2008 - 15:18.

Yeah, sorry - I composed this session proposal originally without access to internet, and I forgot to replace that placeholder when I submitted it. Thanks for noticing - it should now be fixed.