Newbie question - uses, limits and layouts best practice advice please. [#1091924]

Hi I'm just test driving Panels (6.x-3.9) and it looks pretty good.

I have a few questions though:

I've got the Cookbook and have followed a few recipes.

1.
Would I be right in saying that Panels are mainly used for Front pages, navigation pages, in general pages that refer to the content/landing (lowest level in the tree) pages?

2.
I'm happy using templates but equally would like to avoid it as I would like to involve a team of themers that are not technical enough to create their own layouts with templates and would like to use the UI of Panels.
I currently have 2 content types. The main difference between them is the layout - one content type is 3 columns the other is 4 columns.

The way I've dealt with this is creating separate templates for each of them (not sure if this is the best practice).

Is there a common practice of dealing with this sort of scenario and have just one content type - say with 3 col and somehow use the cck and panels to create 4 col layout where needed? I've seen documentation on overrides but it's from Panels 2 (2007) has anyone got anything newer than that?

I'm asking here for the best practice rather than just doing it. I know I could do it but then I would end up with duplicate content.

It just looks to me that Panels are not really used for layout of landing (lowest level in the tree) pages.

Any help would be much appreciated,

Pav

Comments

Comment #1

merlinofchaos commented 14 March 2011 at 15:45

Status:

Active

» Fixed

Would I be right in saying that Panels are mainly used for Front pages, navigation pages, in general pages that refer to the content/landing (lowest level in the tree) pages?

This depends upon how you're structuring your site. Sometimes it's easiest to maintain if all of the site structure -- i.e, non-node content is in Page Manager, even if it's just a 1 column panel. Sometimes it's easiest to use Panels Everywhere to do overall site layout instead of blocks. It varies.

I'm happy using templates but equally would like to avoid it as I would like to involve a team of themers that are not technical enough to create their own layouts with templates and would like to use the UI of Panels.
I currently have 2 content types. The main difference between them is the layout - one content type is 3 columns the other is 4 columns.

The way I've dealt with this is creating separate templates for each of them (not sure if this is the best practice).

Sounds like you want to use Page Manager's 'node template' and set up a panel layout for the two node types. You can use variants here. There's a node override wizard that helps with this.