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Panels Everywhere is an advanced method to completely do away with Drupal's
restrictive blocks system and instead use the much more freeing Panels Layout
system to control how your pages look. Panels Everywhere modifies the page as
it is being rendered to 'wrap' the content in a display and can even take
over your page theme to do away with the need for a page.tpl.php.
Doing this requires that you set up a few things properly, because Drupal is
not really designed for this kind of behavior.
Getting Started
===============
Step 1
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First, back up your site database, just in case. This will make it easy to
completely revert if you decide that Panels Everywhere is not for you. It
is also recommended that you first experiment with this on a small test site
so that you can get a feel for the effects this will have. Sites are best
built from the ground up on Panels Everywhere. Converting an existing site
may be quite difficult.
Step 2
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Enable Panels Everywhere. If not using UID 1, be sure the user you're using
has 'administer page manager' privileges.
Navigate to Structure >> Panels >> Settings >> Everywhere.
Check the box to enable the site template.
Check the box to enable the sample variant.
You may check the box to override the page template, but only if you either
enable the sample variant, or have already created a site template variant
to handle page duties.
If you're still experimenting with Panels Everywhere, you can also enable it on
a theme by theme basis, making it easy to switch back and forth.
Step 3
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Navigate to Structure >> Pages and edit the site_template
(Default site template) page.
Edit your new variant. Customize it if you like. There are some very
important parts of this sample variant:
o The "Page content" pane is absolutely critical. That is the pane that
will hold the actual content of the page you are looking at. If this
pane does not exist, *no content will be rendered*, only the page
template. Think of this as being the $content variable in your
page.tpl.php -- you need that and cannot live without it.
o The "Title type" is set to "From pane" and the Page content pane is
selected as the title. (That is why that pane has a thicker border).
This is how the title of the content gets to be the title of the
page.
o The Navigation, Header and Messages panes are conveniences that
group common page navigation together. For customized sites it is
highly likely that you will theme these or do away with them and
use the individual pieces.
Step 4
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You might also consider creating a completely blank theme, because existing
themes will have CSS that expects different markup. To create a blank theme:
1) mkdir sites/all/themes/blank
2) Create the following five lines in a file named blank.info:
name = Blank
description = Blank
core = 7.x
stylesheets[all][] = blank.css
engine = phptemplate
3) Visit Appearance and change your theme to the blank theme.
Step 5
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You can add additional variants and easily section off your site by using
the selection rules. In particular, there are two selection rules you should
be interested in:
o You can easily add a String: comparison selection rule and write regular
expressions against the URL to use that.
o You can use the Context exists selection rule using the "Managed page"
context. By using this, you can force the site_template to not run on
actual Page Manager pages and use the site_template only as a wrapper
for non Page Manager content. If you do this, you need to make sure that
your other pages contain all the navigation they need.
Extras
======
For best results, customized layouts are the way to go. They can include as
much or as little of the page template as you need, and are easily selectable.
When you customize a layout, if it will be heavily styled, it is recommended
that you provide a separate admin layout (in the layout.inc there are
'admin theme' and 'admin css' settings) to provide a less styled layout for
the purposes of editing. This will be critical to keep the editing UI from
getting too messy.
The navigation, header and messages blocks can be easily customized by copying
the appropriate pane-*.tpl.php files from the themes directory to your theme,
changing them, and clearing cache. If you need to add additional variables,
look at the theme.inc file. You can create similar preprocess functions in
your template.php. The token function can accept any variable that would
normally appear in your page.tpl.php.
You can easily add more variants and use the regular expressions in the
String: comparison selection rules to change which display gets used based on
the URL. You can also use the "Context: exists" selection rule to provide
default panels only for content that is not already in a panel by checking to
see if the "Managed page" context exists.
If you have a lot of different site templates or pages that include their own
navigation, you can also consider using Mini Panels to create common navigation
sidebars for easier maintenance.
If you don't want to create your own layouts, you can also check the Panels
Everywhere project page for an up to date list of themes working with Panels
Everywhere.
Contexts
========
Your site template will now attempt to find contexts from the environment as
best as it can. It handles all of the default Drupal locations, and if using
a Page Manager page it can do some inheritance.
Currently Panels Everywhere can find the following contexts:
o url: The internal URL of the page.
o alias: The alias of the page. Most of the time this is the URL actually
visited, but beware that if the page has multiple aliases, it will
be the *first* alias Drupal finds. i.e, if foo has aliases of 'bar'
and 'baz', when visiting 'bar' or 'baz' the alias will always appear
as 'bar' because it comes first in the list.
o user: The logged in user.
o node: The node being viewed. If visiting node/% or if visiting a page
manager page that contains a node context, that node will be used.
If the page manager page has multiple node contexts (due to
relationships or multiple nid arguments) only the first node will
appear in context.
o account: A user context for the user being viewed. Will appear on profile
pages and on any page manager page with a user context (not
counting the logged in user.)
o term: The taxonomy term being viewed if on a taxonomy term page. This
won't work if viewing multiple terms (i.e, taxonomy/term/1,2) unless
using a page manager page that derives a single term context.
In addition, before this is actually utilized you can use
hook_panels_everywhere_contexts(&$contexts, $placeholders).
If you add contexts, use this function:
panels_everywhere_site_template_add_context($contexts, $context, t('Human readable identifier'), 'keyword', 'internalid');
If $placeholders is TRUE, create your context using
ctools_context_create_empty('type'); if $placeholders is FALSE, create
your context using ctools_context_create('type', $object). If no object
exists, create it as an empty context. It is important that an empty context
appears even if there is not an object to keep the UI consistent.
Making Panels Everywhere aware themes
=====================================
To make a theme PE aware, all that really matters is to provide a default site
template that matches what the theme's page.tpl.php should be. To do this,
create a site template in your site. Export the handler via the bulk export
mechanism. Edit your .info file to contain these lines:
; We provide default page manager pages for our site template
api[page_manager][pages_default][version] = 1
api[page_manager][pages_default][path] = pages
The bulk export will give you a .pages_default.inc file -- just place that in
the 'pages' directory. Your new site template should be immediately available.
It's a very good idea to add a 'selection criteria' so that this template will
only activate when your theme is the active theme.
You can also give your theme a hybrid mode where it will be smart and use its
normal page.tpl.php if the site_template is not in use, and use a stripped
down page.tpl.php if it is. Place the following code in your theme (chances
are you already have a preprocess page).
function MYTHEME_preprocess_page(&$vars) {
if (!empty($vars['panels_everywhere_site_template'])) {
$vars['template_file'] = 'page-panels-everywhere';
}
}
Then copy panels_everywhere/theme/page.tpl.php to
page-panels-everywhere.tpl.php in your theme. Once this is done, your theme
will play nice with Panels Everywhere even if the option to take over the
page template is not enabled.
There is rather a lot of information available via this variable if you like.
The actual template used will be in $vars['panels_everywhere_site_template']['handler']
and the contexts will be in $vars['panels_everywhere_site_template']['contexts'].