One thing panels does well is to put a bunch of unrelated or at least not directly related content in different areas on your page. One thing it doesn’t do well, by itself, is to stripe content across regions.

But what we can do is get Views to do that kind of thing for us. And because Views is not plugin driven, instead of telling the user “Oh you have to theme it” we can provide a plugin that does exactly that. In fact, I’ve decided to try and do away with the “Oh you have to theme it” answer, and created a new project on Drupal, called the Views Bonus Pack where I (and some other people who do a lot of Views work) can put plugins and default views to give the starting user a place to work from as well as a bunch of cool tricks.

If you're reading this blog for the first time, you don't know about my efforts to improve the administrative user experience of Drupal. If you're reading this blog for the second time, you probably came here because of those efforts. If you've been following me, you might know that I've turned from the initial effort of alternadmin to attempting to get some of the stuff into core. That isn't to say that I don't want to continue work on alternadmin, but obviously getting the stuff into Drupal core is going to be much more beneficial in the long term. Even though I can't do *as much* in core as I'd like, I think I can still accomplish a lot.

One of my earliest projects for Drupal was the dashboard. A very simple project, one that does just the minimal necessary to accomplish its goal and no more. At the time, I had lofty goals for the project, but then as time wore on and Views took over my Drupal life, that seemed far away.

Last week, insomnia hit me. (Note: It still hasn't left.) But my poor luck is to the benefit of many Drupal administrators, because my lofty goals have been realized. What are those goals? A system with flexible layout systems. Dashboard could only do the simple top, left, right and bottom. You could embed dashboards within dashboards to get complicated layouts (and I have) but that could be extremely tedious.

I was having the worst time with menu_set_location(), completely unable to get it to work in _nodeapi, despite several examples throughout Drupal’s core code of it working during hook_view(). All I wanted to do was hang it off an existing menu item, but it took me an hour to come up with a formula. Almost everything I tried was actually more code than what I eventually came up with.

First, the site I’m working on for this uses a little technique where much of the structure of the site is in the Primary Links block (i.e, with links across the top) and many of those links have children items. But instead of using the secondary links bar, I have them displaying in a block.