Panels magic

07th September 2010

This blog post is more than 2 years old, so the content may be out of date.

I love unexpected discoveries.

Drupal's Panels module seems to find its way into most of my site builds, along with custom layouts, panel-panes and all sorts of goodness.

I used to declare custom panel layouts this way:

<?php
 
/**
 * Implementation of hook_panels_layouts().
 */
function modulename_layoutname_panels_layouts() {
  $items['layoutname'] = array(
    'title' => t('NAME OF LAYOUT'),
    'icon'  => 'layoutname.png',
    'theme' => 'panel_modulename_layoutname',
    'css'   => 'layoutname.css',
    'panels' => array(
      // 'regions' used in the layout
      'topleft'     => t('Top Left pane'),
      'topmiddle'   => t('Top Middle pane'),
      'topright'    => t('Top Right pane'),
      'bottomleft'  => t('Bottom Left pane'),
      'bottomright' => t('Bottom Right pane'),
     ),  
  );  
  return $items;
}

Turns out we don't need that excessively long function definition...it can be declared as a simple variable instead:

<?php
 
/**
 * Implementation of hook_panels_layouts().
 */
$plugin = array(
  'title' => t('NAME OF LAYOUT'),
  'icon'  => 'layoutname.png',
  'theme' => 'panel_modulename_layoutname',
  'css'   => 'layoutname.css',
  'panels' => array(
    // 'regions' used in the layout
    'topleft'     => t('Top Left pane'),
    'topmiddle'   => t('Top Middle pane'),
    'topright'    => t('Top Right pane'),
    'bottomleft'  => t('Bottom Left pane'),
    'bottomright' => t('Bottom Right pane'),
   ),  
);

This relies on some ctools plugin-processing magic, which specifically looks for the $plugin variable (and this approach should work for all ctools plugins). I can see myself using this a lot :-)

Blog tags:

Comments

#harrison22[DGD... (not verified)

June 6, 2011 - 2:19pm

Hey - I am really glad to find this. Good job!

prokCarkfax (not verified)

September 3, 2011 - 7:50pm

Just making my first post at deglos.com, which seems to be a wonderful forum!

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