When I first discovered Panels on Drupal 7, I nearly cried tears of joy cause I came to the realization that I no longer have to build out new templates for any page that has a different structure (thanks Merlin of Chaos ). Before Panels, I was the king of building too many templates all for one site, and it quite often got a bit messy. But what could I do? Just build the classic “one template to rule them all” website? What about the client’s needs? I couldn’t use views for all of the structure changes?

Yes, Panels was a godsend in my Drupal lovin life. It gave me the freedom to build out one template and then assign different panels to change the number of columns based on content types etc… However, if your going to do panels, it seems like you have to do panels for everything (on that site) or you will start running into frustrating issues like wondering why the columns are not lining up correctly with the rest of your site (because some pages are panel pages and others are not). Or you run into issues of not realizing how to edit a page: Is it a block? A panel page? Is this content generated through views? Or is this just a regular page based off my template? Drupal 7 has really helped eliminate some of this confusion by adding a tooltip when hovering over each node. However, the slightest of these issues (mentioned above) can often create a lot of confusion for your client. Especially one that is not familiar with Drupal.

Simple Tips

After months of approaching this different ways, I had an epiphany. These three simple steps will help guide you:

#1: USE TEMPLATES FOR THEIR PURPOSE!  Don’t force yourself to use a module when just building a template for that architecture just makes more sense and will be less confusing in the long run. I'd say this is mostly true for your front page, if your architecture is different. It's really up to you but be sure to think it through just so you don't get stuck later.

#2: PLAN, PLAN, PLAN! Map out what your site design is going to look like based on your content. Your content often determines design, so create a roadmap of what pages may have different columns and use panels for that. If you do this work ahead of time, your developers (which might be you) and clients will thank you.

#3: STAY CONSISTENT! If you are consistent with how you build Drupal sites, your users (both internal and external) will have a good experience. Your site needs to be usable, and if you are delivering it to a client, they should not have to guess on how to edit a page. It should be a consistent experience.

What do You Prefer?

After speaking with many other Drupalars, many prefer using the Display Suite module which also can control how your content is displayed by drag and drop. It also has full integration with views and panels. This question can be it's own blog post but I am curious to hear what the rest of the Drupal community prefers to work with. Panels or Display suite, or both?

Don't Forget

After all this madness, don’t forget to flush your cache and run the cron! Happy Drupaling!

Taxonomy: Planet DrupalPanelsDrupal development