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.

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.

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,
);

That's right. Panels 2 never managed to get a 2.0 release, it got caught up in rcs and brokenness that was unfixable. Panels 3, however, has managed to duck that curse, and it is now official. Panels 3 is released. It really needs CTools 1.0.

Panels 3.0: http://drupal.org/node/554226
CTools 1.0: http://drupal.org/node/554222

Panels 3 has seen radical changes since Panels 2, and is a great deal more powerful, easier to use and we think you will like it a lot.

Please understand that the upgrade from Panels 1 or 2 to Panels 3 is a little bumpy. Not everything upgrades perfectly. Some people have had to uninstall and reinstall to make it work. Some of the back and forth during the betas and rcs caused irreparably messed up data that does not carry forward properly. I apologize for this. BACK UP BEFORE YOU UPGRADE.. If you do not read these release notes, and do not back up, please do not post issues. =)

The best way to use Panels is to pair it with the Page Manager from the Chaos Tools Suite, and use its interface for creating panel pages. This completely replaces the Panels Pages module from Panels 2. If you used an earlier beta version, the Page Manager used to be known as delegator. If you are upgrading from Panels 2, and the CTools module is already in the tree but not enabled, it will be automatically enabled for you. This is the best way to upgrade from Panels 2. Please ensure that you are using CTools 1.0 alongside this, and not a beta version! Earlier versions of CTools will not work with Panels 3.0!

Page Manager introduces the concept of Variants which are different ways that a page can be displayed. For many uses, you will have only one variant. However, if you want a page to look different based upon the data being displayed (for example, you want story nodes displayed differently from article nodes), or permissions of the user (you may want an administrator to see something different from a regular user, or a logged in user to see something different from a logged out user) then you will add additional variants to a page. You will use the selection rules to determine which variant a user sees. Remember that the first variant that passes the selection rules will be used, so be sure to put the most specific rules first and the more general rules later. You can put a variant with no rules at all last and it will serve as a default.

There is a real need for tutorials, screencasts and documentation for this system to be written. It's at this point that I'm really looking to the community to provide help. My own motivation to write this stuff is fairly low, and I know there are writers out there who use this stuff who can help. Please participate! Documentation is a great way to give back to the community in return for software, and requires very little (sometimes no!) coding knowledge at all.

This is a call to translators. If you're interested in translating Panels and or CTools, I am going to do a full release by the middle of next week. Any translation work you want to go out with this release should be checked into CVS by then!

Panels has only one translation and it's very old, so it is probably more or less useless. CTools has no translations at all (and I am not surprised by this).

I spent the better part of a week doing nothing but this and sleep, but I think it's nearly ready. If you're brave, you can go get the current one out of CVS. I warn you, it'll be minorly annoying because I got rid of the delegator (What's that do?!) module and replaced it with the Page Manager (I bet you can guess what that does) module.

First, once you've got everything, if you go to admin/build/panels you'll see the Panels dashboard. It's really just an overlay over other stuff, because Panels itself doesn't really have a UI. But it gives UI to lots of other stuff.

It's that time, and Panels 3 is finally getting close to beta. I have two major pieces of work to finish up (a proper preview widget and the upgrade path from Panels 5) and then I will release the first beta. I expect the first beta to be relatively unstable in terms of the features being buggy, but finally the API should be more or less stable, other than last minute fixes to get everything consistent with each other.