I'm just starting out with Aurora, coming from a bit of experience with Zen. I'm loving it! Thanks! But as someone without a lot of experience with Panels or Blockify or Singularity, I find myself guessing at quite a few things. I need to review my understanding of the recommended approach to page and panel layout.
I have read the README.md file in the aurora theme folder, and the online Documentation here:
http://snugug.github.io/Aurora/features/
as well as the following threads:
- Document the removal of Panels integration
- Panels 3: Creating a custom layout in your theme
- Custom Panels Layouts
Is this a roughly accurate summary of the recommended approach to creating layouts in 7.x-3.2?:
- use Singularity as the grid system, using SASS to apply grids to layout file(s) in the layouts partials folder
- use Blockify to pull various elements out of the page.tpl.php template and make them configurable via blocks interface, or insertable into panels
- use a custom, one-section-per-row panels layout to insert content into panel sections instead of using sidebar or similar regions
- use the breakpoint mixin to lay out all custom panel sections and blocks in a responsive layout written into the layout SASS
So, I don't do any drag and drop layout in Panels, I don't use the "flexible" panel layout or any of the other pre-built Panels layouts, the ONLY layout I use in Panels is the new sample layout, or one modelled after it?
I don't use Drupal page "regions" much anymore either, dropping sidebars in favour of a "pancake" stack of regions, or more likely, replacing them instead with a pancake stack of Panel sections.
All my layout work after organizing the single column of blocks or sections for mobile-first content is done in SASS by adding grid-spans and breakpoints to each block or section I want to make responsive.
Am I getting the gist of everything here or is there something else I can be doing with panels or by inserting classes into sections or blocks that will make all this even awesomer?
For a beginner, I think a more complete walkthrough of the recommended approach to layout would be valuable. While I gathered all these things from the online documentation, the way all these things integrate together into a site is a bit opaque to a new user - especially one without prior experience with earlier versions of Aurora, or with limited Panels, Blockify, Singularity experience.
Thanks for any feedback or help to clarify my misunderstandings.
Comments
Comment #1
iamcarrico CreditAttribution: iamcarrico commentedI know this is late--- but you are doing everything correctly. I have read over this issue many times wondering if we can offer a better overview of theming intended in Aurora--- but in reality Aurora is just giving the tools to do custom themes. We have some recommendations (such as using blockify) form our experience but that is it.
As a note: I am trying to get a better Drupal 7 theming doc put together. I haven't had the time to finish it as of now, but when I do it can be found here https://www.gitbook.io/book/iamcarrico/drupal-theming-docs/
Go get 'em tiger--- you got this.
Comment #2
pkiff CreditAttribution: pkiff commentedComment #3
pkiff CreditAttribution: pkiff commented[Change above is just a fix to a broken link in the issue summary]
Thanks for the feedback! I look forward to checking out (and hopefully contributing to...?!) the theming docs that you folks are working on.
I did manage to roll out a site using Aurora 3.x following the strategy I outlined above and everything went fine. I also used a similar strategy to roll out a site using Omega 4.x. Both used a Singularity grid system and a simple "stacked pancake" Panels structure for regions. The main difference between the two was that I used Blockify for the Aurora site, and I used Panels Everywhere for the Omega site.
Though there is no reason I couldn't have reversed those choices, since as you point out, Aurora doesn't demand that one take a layout approach using Blockify, it just provides tools that you can use as a basis for whatever theme layout strategy you prefer.