Published: Wed, 09/23/15Download this episodeProject

• For people who might not know, what is a Drupal distribution?

  • Out of the box, vanilla Drupal doesn’t do much - you have to install modules and mold it into what you want
  • A distribution is Drupal prepackaged with contrib modules and themes, pre-configured for a specific use case (OOB, X+Y)

• What is Panopoly?

  • A “starter site” distribution (replacement for vanilla Drupal)
  • A “base distribution” on which to build other distributions
  • A set of Features modules that can be used outside of Panopoly

• Why would someone want to use Panopoly instead of vanilla Drupal?

  • Improved blank slate
  • Includes some the most popular modules and configuration that almost everyone is using anyway
  • Hide Drupal-isms from site managers and users
  • WYSIWYG, Media, responsive layouts, edit in place, live previews, improved search, UX improvements, a11y improvements
  • Include a bunch of stuff backported from D8: toolbar, responsive bartik, etc
  • Unified content/layout management system built on Panels eco-system
  • Rather than learning all that community knowledge over, re-use a well thought out, tested approach to doing Drupal

• Some people love Panels, but others hate it. Why would someone who isn’t a “Panels lover” want to use Panopoly?

  • Best of Panels eco-system
  • You build with Views, Entities/Fields, custom code, whatever - the Panels bits tie those things together and allow users to customize them
  • We hide the nastiest bits (page_manager UI) from users and site managers

• Why would someone want to create their own distro?

  • Boilerplate, build once / deploy lots, maintenance of lots of sites
  • Even small organizations can benefit

• What advantages do you get by build your distro on Panopoly?

  • Like “base theme” shared work (like WYSIWYG, responsive, etc) and defined approach
  • Focus only on the unique stuff in your distro (by fitting into Panopoly’s architecture)

• Why would someone want to use one of Panopoly’s Features modules outside of Panopoly?

  • [Quick background on Feature]
  • Dozen or so features
  • If like just a piece of Panopoly (ex. panopoly_wysiwyg) you could steal it!
  • Lots of thought into buttons to enable, filtering for control/security, additional features like Media/Linkit

• Updating distributions can be hard. What does Panopoly do to help with this?

  • [explain why hard]
  • Docs
  • CI
  • distro_update

• Security updates in particular can be hard, because you have to wait for the distro to make its own update. How does Panopoly handle them?

  • [mention how handled in the past / security team]

• What are the plans for Panopoly in Drupal 8?

Episode Links: David on drupal.orgDavid on Twitter (@dsnopek)David on Twitter (@mydropninja)David on webPanopoly project pagePanopoly demo from DrupalCon Austin (demo starts at 18:15)#drupal-scotch on IRC#Panopoly on IRCPanopoly groupTags: planet-drupal