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See Advanced Courses NAH, I know Enough149 Using Panopoly and it's Drupal 8 Future with David Snopek - Modules Unraveled Podcast
For people who might not know, what is a Drupal distribution?
- Out of the box, vanilla Drupal doesn’t do much - you have to install modules and mold it into what you want
- A distribution is Drupal prepackaged with contrib modules and themes, pre-configured for a specific use case (OOB, X+Y)
What is Panopoly?
- A “starter site” distribution (replacement for vanilla Drupal)
- A “base distribution” on which to build other distributions
- A set of Features modules that can be used outside of Panopoly
Why would someone want to use Panopoly instead of vanilla Drupal?
- Improved blank slate
- Includes some the most popular modules and configuration that almost everyone is using anyway
- Hide Drupal-isms from site managers and users
- WYSIWYG, Media, responsive layouts, edit in place, live previews, improved search, UX improvements, a11y improvements
- Include a bunch of stuff backported from D8: toolbar, responsive bartik, etc
- Unified content/layout management system built on Panels eco-system
- Rather than learning all that community knowledge over, re-use a well thought out, tested approach to doing Drupal
Some people love Panels, but others hate it. Why would someone who isn’t a “Panels lover” want to use Panopoly?
- Best of Panels eco-system
- You build with Views, Entities/Fields, custom code, whatever - the Panels bits tie those things together and allow users to customize them
- We hide the nastiest bits (page_manager UI) from users and site managers
Why would someone want to create their own distro?
- Boilerplate, build once / deploy lots, maintenance of lots of sites
- Even small organizations can benefit
What advantages do you get by build your distro on Panopoly?
- Like “base theme” shared work (like WYSIWYG, responsive, etc) and defined approach
- Focus only on the unique stuff in your distro (by fitting into Panopoly’s architecture)
Why would someone want to use one of Panopoly’s Features modules outside of Panopoly?
- [Quick background on Feature]
- Dozen or so features
- If like just a piece of Panopoly (ex. panopoly_wysiwyg) you could steal it!
- Lots of thought into buttons to enable, filtering for control/security, additional features like Media/Linkit
Updating distributions can be hard. What does Panopoly do to help with this?
- [explain why hard]
- Docs
- CI
- distro_update
Security updates in particular can be hard, because you have to wait for the distro to make its own update. How does Panopoly handle them?
- [mention how handled in the past / security team]
What are the plans for Panopoly in Drupal 8?
About Drupal Sun
Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:
- Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
- Facet based on tags, author, or feed
- Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
- View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created
See the blog post at Evolving Web