Setting up the Variant - Add content to the panel
We go to the 'content' tab and all areas are shown in the layout as grey boxes. Each part of the panel layout has a name – so 'left side' or 'right side' or 'left top'. You add content separately to each part or region.
Note the little gear on the top left. By clicking that you will get a menu with which you can add content.Select 'Add content' after clicking the gear. You'll want a decent modern browser because there's a lot of javascript stuff being used here. If it doesn't work, we've found Firefox to be consistently pretty good with Panels.Once you've selected 'Add Content', a dialog box pops up offering a huge range of Drupal content to add to your area. The dialog box has a number of tabs on the left side to categorise the content for you.
There's an explanation later of each of these. For the moment, we simply want to add plain 'Node' data to the Panel. So we select 'Node'. This contains all the elements inside a node – the body, the title and if you're using CCK, each CCK field and group. You can pick and choose which one's go where on your layout. Amazingly powerful!The Node elements are all listed. We have a CCK group called 'Banner' which pulls together the banner of the page. So we insert that by clicking on it. (Field group: Banner in Standard Page) – first column at the bottom.We then get taken to the settings dialog related specifically to the banner being inserted. Each bit of content you add to the panel has settings associated with them – depending on what that content is and is trying to do.
In this case the data will come from the current node (Node being viewed), but we don't want it to have the CCK Fieldgroup title. So we click override title and leave it blank.
Then we scroll to the bottom and confirm. We return to our content layout and our new content is there.You can always edit or change your settings for that particular bit of content by clicking the gear on it's top right and selecting 'Settings'.We can do the same for the top right image, adding it to the right column, and the contact form. This time we select 'contact form' from the 'widgets'
In this way we start filling out our 2 column layout. It's not quite what we wanted, so a little later we'll show you how to create your own custom layout.