Programming blog

So I love the Panels module. It gives me much, much greater control over where I want to place my content, and how I create my blocks. It's stupendous.

It has a serious problem though, the actual construction of content is not meant to be done by a beginner. The form includes many unnecessary elements for a novice user and the process is confusing. Worse still, you can't use either the IMCE module or any WYSIWYG editor when creating custom panes. This is a serious issue for many of my users, most of whom will be publishing to the web for the first time.

So I wrote a module which takes the process of custom pane construction, and tries to simplify it as much as possible. The basic idea is, people navigate to a Panes tab, where they see all of the displays associated with this group (or one display in the case of a panels node). They can then choose to add panes to the display, and be sent to a separate form, or edit the custom panes that have already been built. Since this is a separate form, the users have access to a WYSIWYG editor and the nice IMCE pop-up for adding images.

I think this will make managing custom pane content much easier for most of my users. We'll see, I'm going to let my partner know about it, and see what he thinks.

Screen shots:

Main pane edit window

Add pane window

Edit pane window

Notice the use of a WYSIWYG editor in both the 'Add pane' and 'Edit pane' forms (and the link to the IMCE image uploader). This is what really lowers the difficulty of adding nice custom panes to a panels node or an Og panels page.