I think the pictures speak for themselves on this one.

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The last few weeks have seen an intense flurry of work on the Panels suite of modules. Today I've rolled releases of the Panels 3.7, CTools 1.7, Panels Everywhere 1.1 and a tiny bugfix release for Tinsel 1.1. This has created a massive chunk of new features that we're hoping will push Panels even more into the mainstream by seriously extending the power available to site builders, particularly in terms of giving site administrators better options for doing their jobs without having to worry about details they've taken care of.

I'm looking for someone with solid CSS skills and good photoshop skills and a strong understanding of modular design to help fix and create more style bases for Panels Stylizer. If you haven't seen it, the Stylizer lets you create re-usable styles for your panel panes and regions directly in the UI. Behind the scenes it will do image recoloring and slicing to get exactly what it needs, and cache those images in the files directory so they can be used. Right now I ship with a usable but not exactly perfectly rounded shadow box.

Last Friday, my time at Sony Music came to an end. The end wasn't abrupt, I had several weeks to prepare, but the top level of the group I worked in decided that it was time to end remote development and bring everybody in-house. They offered full relocation to New York which would allow me to keep my position, but I love the Bay Area too much. I did give serious thought to the idea of moving, because working with Sony Music has been great. But it does not match my current personal goals to leave here.

After over four years of working with Drupal, I have finally reached one of the major goals that I have envisioned from the beginning. Today I released the first beta of Panels Everywhere, a new module that works with Panels and Page Manager that allows you to never use the block management system again.

Ahh, you gotta love IRC. Allow me to share a short edited snippet. IP addresses have been removed as well as some comments by people that are not really relevant to the conversation. The best part are the /whois results.

I'm not in any way upset about this. I think this is funny, and felt like sharing.


[20:01] *** kinesis (n=k@xx.xx.xx.xx) joined
[20:01] drupal vs joomla and why
[20:03] kinesis http://www.whitehouse.gov/
[20:03] This is an IRC chat, not google.
[20:03] thats nice

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/merlinofchaos/the-chaos-tools-suite

This is the modal test module. You can create the .info file that goes with it.
<?php
/**
* Implementation of hook_menu().
*/
function modal_test_menu() {
$items = array();

$items['modal_test'] = array(
'title' => 'Modal test',
'access callback' => TRUE,
'page callback' => 'modal_test_page',
);

$items['modal_test/form'] = array(
'title' => 'AJAX modal dialog',
'access callback' => TRUE,
'page callback' => 'modal_test_popup',
'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
);

Apparently I've been sort of ignoring an increased friction between Drupal designers and developers the last few days. Not that I don't know it's there, I'm right up in the forefront of that friction, feeling fairly regularly told what to do by people who I feel aren't fully informed as to why I created things the way I did. And most often I don't react well to this, and I cause more friction than I really should. But this isn't just about me. That friction is there and it's all around.

Heading to the airport to go to Paris shortly. DrupalCon is Sep 1-5 and it'll be fun to see a bit of Paris before that.

For the next two weeks expect no or next to no activity from me in any of my issue queues. For a week or two after we come back, don't expect much better. Post-trip trauma is always fun.