Hi Justin,
Thanks for the feedback.
I think you're over engineering this problem. I see what you're trying to do... but wheres this data come from? What is this data?
Just a note--you can put as much content as you want in a region in panels. You don't need a separate panel template.
Hmmm, but if I put in several Views, all of the same type, but send different arguments for it [row1, row2, row3] then I still have to manually define the row numbers, and then I am lacking some of the theming control that I have now with the different rows. [I wrote a custom panel-style which themes the first view element of each row to be the accordion controller of that entire panel-row]
The data is coming from Node-creation. There are many types of nodes, some with a square image, some text, a couple of CCK fields etc. And then also some wide image types, some splash header content types, some 3 column list content types, some carousel content types, and even some tab-view content types. These all have common CCK fields to determine 'Panel' and 'Row' [but the user see's "Page" and "Sub-section" as this more logical from a content management perspective]
Some content can appear in more than one Panel/Row, so this is a multi-select check-box field. There are 10 such Panel pages, and they range from 3 Rows to 8 Rows [I hope].
I hope this makes sense; as it is indeed complicated.
Kind regards,
Sebastian.