Drupal 6 Panels Cookbook [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Drupal is one of the major open-source content management systems, with amazing power and flexibility. That flexibility comes with a cost: Complexity.

Drupal's complexity is made worse by the Achilles' heel of open-source, a lack of consistent and comprehensive documentation. Newcomers to Drupal seem to wander around in a daze, tripping over features, and suffering mind-numbing confusion from the many different ways even simple requirements can be implemented. That is not a criticism of Drupal or open-source: If you were an ace developer that had the chance of writing code or writing documentation, what would you choose to work on?

And if supporters of traditional commercial applications are at all honest, they'll admit documentation available for many commercial packages isn't up to much either, or there wouldn't be such a huge business in third-party books and training there either.

So having great power in Drupal that you would like to use - but can't use effectively because of the documentation barrier - makes Drupal books very important.

This book attempts to address documentation gap in Drupal Panels. Panels offer the possibility of drag-n-drop page design, and the promise of theming that breaks out of the traditional Drupal look and feel. Where Panels is a popular add-on module for Drupal 6, much of this functionality is core to the future of Drupal, making it a must-know for developers. So how does the book deliver?

Content Chapter By Chapter

The concepts of panels build up in a logical way through the first couple of chapters, with only the occasional confusing reference to project examples or code that don't exist in the text. By the end of the second chapter, we're starting to hit the gravel road: The screenshots and text don't match well, references begin to appear to samples that don't exist, and the editing and grammar become shakier. It's as though the author and editor got bored and started to fast-forward.

In chapter three, some of the cool things about Panels are covered, like using mini-panels to place panels inside panels, achieving really flexible layouts. If you are completely new to Panels, the descriptions and some suggested models are useful. But if you are looking for this book, you probably already understand what *should* be possible with Panels, and you need something deeper than the content here.

Chapter four is perhaps the most disappointing, as the promise of the nice front pages is not really delivered on. Yes, it will lead you through the nested arrangement, and talks briefly about theming. But some of the hard stuff for noobs is getting theming to happen in nested arrangements - and that's not covered in enough depth to get you far.

The fifth chapter covers organic groups with Panels. It could just be the applications I work on, but this seems a bit obscure. For me, this space could have been much better used to deliver a much more complete example of what's in chapter four.

The CCK/Views chapter does cover the mechanics of Panels integration with these important modules. Typical of other chapters, the author makes comments like "Let's create a beautiful Panel page now", but then the text stops short of all the steps required to produce something most people would consider beautiful because the integration with the theming required is not really addressed.

The user profile functionality in chapter seven was not something I had immediate need for, so I can't really comment on it. Chapter eight does cover some interesting modules to extend Panels that you might not otherwise consider. Chapter nine claims in the introduction to offer a "deep understanding" of Views used with Panels, another valuable topic that perhaps cannot deliver what it promises in only 11 pages.

Chapter ten presents a complete project for a travel website, a good summary that helps to link things together. However, the chapter introduction tantalizes with an unfortunate mistake, "We will cover the entire site architecture and page construction using Panels. We will INCLUDE [my emphasis] the detailed theming portion, as it is altogether a different topic." What they meant to say is that again the book will stop short of presenting a complete solution that *looks* nice.

The chapter goes on to recommend the use of an alternative distribution of Drupal for performance reasons, but doesn't go into enough detail on managing Panels' performance impacts to be useful. A performance discussion might be better left for a book focusing on Drupal performance tuning, which depends on many site-specific factors far beyond just whether Panels are used.

Other Thoughts

One problem with Drupal documentation generally is that it often does not match what you'll see on your own screen. Drupal itself, along with many of its modules, is constantly under development, and many tutorials and posts were perfectly correct with older module versions, but simply add to the noise when looking for current documentation. It is a big plus that for this book there seems to have been a short gap between completing the book and publishing it, because as at the time of this review, a wonderful percentage of screen shots and tabs actually match what you will see. Unfortunately continuing progress means this advantage will be lost over time - so if you are going to get the book at all, get it now.

There was a time, perhaps now over, where computer books were sold by the pound, and authors seemed to be rewarded for writing massively long books that could have been much shorter. At only 200 pages, the author here cannot be criticized for that, especially given the number of screen shots. But at the cost of a little more thought and perhaps 50 pages more in the areas that are short-changed, the book could have been really useful.

As with an increasing number of books, this one is available in both a PDF (personalized to reduce theft by using watermarks on every page) and as a paper book, with a big discount on the e-book if you order together. This is always a good thing and Packt are to be commended for making sensible DRM-free versions available.

Buying the Book

The author and editor are obviously knowledgeable about Panels, and probably could have told you what you really need to know if you could sit down and ask them. But the book doesn't answer many of the questions you would want answered. It may be that trying to fit things into the 'cookbook' paradigm has make things too disjointed. Many of the 'cookbook' sections are not used in a meaningful way at all, such as the "How it works..." sections at the end of every recipe that are typically just summaries of functionality, and give no insight into how things work at all. Perhaps following a single example through the book a la introductory Ruby on Rails books might have served better.

If you've read to this point, you are probably really trying to find out how to delivering the promising screen shots of sites like [...] and [...]. Cool Drupal sites like those really do appear in this book. But if you were hoping it might actually help you create pages like that, you need to hope someone else will write a more complete book on panels.

Much like with searching for Drupal documentation on the web, you will find helpful bits and pieces here, but they don't all fit together, and you are left you with something short of a workable solution. Many of the 'recipes' are more like cooking tips - useful to know how to avoid lumps in your gravy, but not much help when you were looking for a dinner recipe.

So should you buy the book? Not if you can find a better one. I haven't. If you can't either, you'll just have to put up with fact that the paved road runs out so near the front of the book. You may just have to roll up the care windows, try not to choke on the dust, and pretend that instead of learning what you needed to deliver your project, you really wanted to go off-roading.

When the request came for me to review Drupal 6: Panels Cookbook by Bhavin (Vin) Patel, I was excited. I've been a software developer forever, a Web developer for as long as there's been a Web, and a Drupal developer since D6 was imminent. I have two Drupal books myself, and am working one about D7 Views, but with all that, one glaring hole in my self-education has been Panels; it would be my first chance to use it.

Panels is the big cousin of the Views module, and big brother to the Panels Everywhere module. All were written by Earl Miles, aka merlinofchaos, a deserving macha in the Drupal community and, in my opinion, a topnotch coder: all the more reason to look forward to the book.

I need to mention the parameters within which I formed this review. I first considered the book format, because it greatly influences my expectations. A Packt 'cookbook' does not have the format or aims of a standard computer reference or 'Bible' text. It is meant to give the reader a broad but shallow exposure to a topic by using a plethora of step-by-step examples. Basically, if you come away from a cookbook feeling excited by the technology and wanting to dive deeper into learning it, the author has done a good job.

Patel starts off the book with the obligatory chapter on installation and setup, though this one contains a bit more since it is a broader Getting Started chapter. Panels is a contributed module, and installing it will be a familiar process to Drupalers. He covers installing Chaos Tools (Ctools) as well, since it is a required module. There are instructions for those upgrading from a prior release of Panels, too. Having installed and set up the module, Patel then leads you through creating a basic Panels page and node, the building blocks of a Panels layout.

It was early on that I discovered a couple things that made using the book more challenging than it needs to be. Patel uses a non-American dialect of English. While it's quite understandable, at times the usage and sentence structure require one to stop, blink, and reread the passage. Some might find this to be annoying. I looked at it as reading dialogue written by Dickens or Twain, and was fine with it. The other thing is that the instructions at times seem to skip a step, going from point A to point C without a mention of the requisite point B. Again, this causes the occasional confusion for a few moments, but nothing one cannot get past.

Chapter 2 covers a number of topics related to navigating and making use of the Panels interface and related topics. One might be biting at the bit to start creating meaty layouts by now, but Panels is a fairly complex framework to use, so having these 'recipes' available is important. Keep in mind that a 'cookbook' is designed so that most recipes are independent of each other, so they can usually be skipped over, if desired.

This chapter also touches on the topic of context, the context of 'context' here being the circumstances in which a layout exists. For example, with the standard capabilities of Drupal, a block is a fairly independent piece of content. If you want the content of a block to be intelligently related to the main content on the page, it's a difficult nut to crack aside. It can be achieved to some extent with the crafty use of Views, more so by writing a custom module, but becomes pleasantly easy using Panels. This is a big and important topic, and though this is a cookbook and not meant to be deep, I think this subject could have done with a chapter of its own.

Theming is the topic of Chapter 3. Even though Panels handles much of the work, there will likely be the desire to (re)theme its output to varying degrees, and this chapter guides the reader through examples of manipulating it with CSS, adding it to a theme region, and other useful topics.

In Chapter 4 we jump into examples of what is expected from Panels, doing things like replacing the front page, overriding the node edit form, using Panels with feeds and even using mini panels, basically panels within blocks. In Chapters 5 through 9 we move on to using Panels with other common Drupal add-on functionality: organic groups, the custom content kit (CCK), the advanced profile kit, composite layouts and Views.

Chapter 10 builds on much of what was covered and what Panels excels in by creating an example of a travel industry web site. The travel tie-in really doesn't matter, though, as one can easily extrapolate the example to whatever subject matter the intended site will contain.

I enjoyed working my way through the book. I found Patel's recipes to be creative and useful, and they gave me a sufficient understanding of Panels and its capabilities to begin considering possibilities for its use on existing and upcoming sites.

And that marks the success of a cookbook.

I considered myself very lucky to find this book and was excited to have the chance to read it. As an old school web developer and a technical trainer, mostly involved with Java, Web Services, Portals, and Identity Integration, I've been in a Drupal learning state for several years. I've never quite had enough time to really sit down and figure out how to accomplish all the awesome things I can do with Drupal. This book is a rarity since it addresses Panels and I saw it as a good opportunity to learn more about one of the most revered Drupal modules. The cookbook style layout seems a little advanced for a starter. Please note that Packt Publishing gave me a free copy of this book to read and review.

While there is information available on the Internet about Panels, I really like to have a book in my hands especially when I'm trying to learn something new and do it by myself. The book exposed me to what can be done with Panels and mostly how to do it. The author provides several step-by-step recipes from installing and upgrading the module to integrating it with another popular module, Views. They cover the Panels UI, mini-panels, and a module to use with Panels to create more complex profiles, Advanced Profile Kit. I definitely feel like I learned alot from this book and, if nothing else, I gained exposure to the module and some ideas for creative uses for Panels.

All that being said, I hope we never use a cookbook like this at home to make dinner. This is one of the first cookbook style books I've ever read so I can't really compare this to other technical cookbooks but I was definitely left wanting more detail and continuity. I felt the language was very difficult to read and comprehend without having to go back and review again for clarity. I became confused many times throughout the book while trying to figure out what the author was referring to in his examples. I'm sure the author knows Panels well enough to work with it on a professional level but, I didn't feel like it was explained in a way someone without Panels experience could easily understand. An example of the confusion includes the many times this book tries to guide the reader to create a beautiful web page and all I see is a simple page with some content in various places. I must be missing the beautiful part. Throughout the book there are "How it works..." sections that are really just a summary of what we did with no explanation of how it works. These constant periods of confusion made me feel like either I was missing the big picture or that the content didn't really get finished.

I like the fact that the book introduces Panels and gives recipes enabling the reader to see the possibilities for integrating this module into web development. Panels seems to come across as very intimidating but can be a useful and very powerful tool.

PROS: If you want a real book with paper (or ebook) that you can read offline and are trying to wrap your head around the Panels module, then this book should be on your wishlist.
CONS: If you are not comfortable with reading between the lines and imagining your own end game when presented with basic ideas then you should consider a different book on Panels.