If your site only uses fixed, basic layouts, and simple block positioning, then stick to tpl files. I built a relatively high-end project on it, and am using it on my next venture. It provides a number of pre-built layouts which you can arrange, which are all responsive. Evaluate if you really need it.ĭoes it play well with responsive design? Like most powerful/flexibile things though, it can add quite a bit of overhead in complexity on several fronts, so I wouldn't use it just because the last site did. The latter keeps their grubby little hands out of your server and (usually) far away from php code. In the cases where you need blocks with a little more flexibility, create custom admin interfaces, or need to add (granular) client control to give the client editing capabilities for relatively complicated things in lieu of tpl files, it can be very useful. Doing that programmatically got messy fast. Panels was the only thing that made accomplishing that sane. One if you're anonymous, one you're logged in, one of the profile is yours, and two different versions based on your approved relationship with that person. I had to create a site with relationships on it, so the user profiles would have quite a few different versions. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If anyone is interested in contributing ideas and/or collaborating on a better, more user-friendly system, I'd love to hear your ideas and get some help since I have a mandate to fix this at work eventually (and I'll totally bump it up if needed). There are tons of undocumented "features" (like how to make it use the title from a menu item, which is the best way I've thought of to translate things until they're done the integration). I've occasionally toyed with the idea of either adding a user-friendly, i18n-friendly layer on top of panels or just rewriting it to make more sense and be cleaner in general - as genius as merlin's work is, it's really lacking in simplicity and in UI friendlyness.Īddendum: Also, its performance is kinda crappy (we stay away from panelizer for that reason and rely on altering templates) and it makes debugging a nightmare. We also have so many work-arounds and caveats because of its lack of i18n support, its quite ridiculous. In our organization, we need Panels, but we limit its uses to when absolutely necessary and we take a lot of odd steps so that most people never have to touch it at all (which is similar to how we treat Views, since it's almost as complex). I really think there's a lot of room for UI improvement that makes it easier to learn for non-developers who just want to manage a page's layout (maybe dev/designer mode like Dreamweaver has). Panels is the ultimate example of a developer tool that's easy to use but very difficult to learn. Panels really sucks for i18n integration, it's UI is horribly complex.
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