Hi Shai,

I intentionally was avoiding using Drupal terms, so that I could explain more in general what I was trying to achieve, rather than refering to a specific solution.

What I am leaning towards now, is making a custom panel view, with one column, and 8 row "slots" which I can then fill with the same 3 views stacked into each row, 8 times over [24 views in all, although it is nothing more than the same 3 views repeated 8 times]. And in each row, I send the argument "row1" or "row2".

I can't see how I could build this up dynamically, as it is, after all, nothing more than a looped iteration. So instead I am making this panel once, and then hopefully it will cover all of my needs for all of the sub areas of the website.

If anyone know how to build a Panel page, as an iteration through some kind of array [or in my case a 2d array: an array of arrays], I'd love to hear it as it would change how I am building this, and also make it so that I am not loading panels with 8 rows on pages where only 3 are needed, and it would also make it so that if I ever had a page with 10 rows, I wouldn't have to go back and add 2 extra rows to all the existing panels either...

Thanks!

Seb.

Shai Gluskin wrote:

Sebastian,

I think you are using the word "module" in a way that doesn't quite make sense in a Drupal context. It sounds like what you are calling a "module", Panels calls "pane".

It also seems like you are calling "View" what might be a row in a View. Not quite sure.

But in any case I'm reasonably sure that Panels is robust enough to cover your use-case.

Shai Gluskin

On Nov 27, 2009, at 10:04 PM, sebastian inforazor@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hi folks, here is a question about approach.

I have a site design which has several large content modules, and within them, several sub-modules.

If I had only one module per page, I would do the following:

1 panel 1+ views which call up the respective nodes

But now I need a page that has:

several panel-blocks with x views per panel

they need to be grouped like this, because each content-module has a collapse/expand button, which will hide all the views associated to the that panel [with a jquery nice effect].

... I don't think this can be done with the way panels work..., unless there is a way to add panels within other panels?

or another way to implement? any suggestions?

Thanks!

Sebastian.

[ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]

Hello Justin, others,

Sorry if my description was not clear.

Here is the solution I am implementing:

http://fountain-city.com/sample.png

Only, at the moment I can't use "N Rows" in a layout because that has to be predetermined by the layout. So my question was: is there a way to make a layout with a dynamic number of rows, as apposed to a fixed number?

The length [N count] would be controlled by the number of sub-array Nodes [CCK category field] for a given page [another CCK field].

So 1 CCK field for PAGE [first argument] and another CCK field for ROW [human value is specific per page, but relates to the row it appears in, the second argument].

Each row has 3 or more views in it, and each view will call up more than one node.

Each row also has a header, which controls the accordion roll up of the sub area. That part, including creating a custom Panels Style Plugin so that the top item of each row is in it's own distinct DIV, I have under the belt.

I hope this is more clear now!

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Kindly,

Sebastian.

Justin Gruenberg wrote:

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 12:00 PM, sebastian inforazor@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hi Shai,

I intentionally was avoiding using Drupal terms, so that I could explain more in general what I was trying to achieve, rather than refering to a specific solution.

I think you'd have better luck if you described exactly what you are trying to do, because you are using 'views' and 'panels' which are both drupal modules.

It really isn't clear what you're asking. You can add views (as in, provided by the views module) to a panel. You can use selection rules to decide what variant of a panel is displayed.

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.