I'm working on a site that is going to be a content driven site with multiple contributors, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to give the editors control over the placement of content. We've created a basic panels page with nine panes that will be used on all pages. There will be a separate panel page with the same structure for the front page. There is a vocabulary (called Content for now) that will be used to tag all Article (a custom content type) nodes. The Content vocabulary has three top level terms, and then multiple terms under each of those. What we would like to do is use the panel page for each second level term, where the three top level terms will be drop down menus with the second level items as menu items. The content displayed in the panes would be for that second level term.
So, for instance, one of my top level terms is Everyday, and I have three second level terms under it of Arts & Culture, Entertaining, and Family & Kids. On the front page, there would be an Everyday menu, and then Arts & Culture, Entertaining, and Family & Kids would be items on that menu. Each item would go to the panel page, where all of the content on the page would be Articles that are tagged with the appropriate second level term. The front page would be similar, but would use a nodequeue just for items on the front page.
It's easy enough to create a view with an argument and pass that through the panel for the secondary pages. The tricky part is assigning the nodes to the different panes. For the front page, my initial idea was to create a nodequeue that would contain all the Article nodes I want to display on the front page. A suggestion was made that I could use one view with multiple displays, and each display would specify a nodequeue offset. I would then assign a different display to each pane. The problem with that, though, is that as newer items are added to the queue, the displayed nodes would move to different panes. For the secondary pages, I don't want to use nodequeues, because there are many categories, and that would be a lot of nodequeues.
So with all that explained, what would be a good way to assign nodes to my various panes? I'm trying to do it in such a way that it's very easy for editors to select which nodes are to be displayed on the front page and secondary pages. I already have a view with Views Bulk Operations set up to assign to the Front Page queue and publish/unpublish, so if I can go that route, that would be good.
Thanks.
Steve