Open Atrium 2.0 Code Sprint with Pantheon

Last week we had a great 3-day code sprint for Open Atrium 2 (OA2) and Panopoly here at the Phase2 office in Alexandria. Joining the Phase2 Open Atrium team (Mike Potter mpotter, Peter Cho pcho, Frank Febbraro febbraro) was the Panopoly team of Matt Cheney (populist) and Brad Bowman (beeradb) from Pantheon. The goal of the sprint was to work on various issues in Panopoly/Panels that needed some improvements for Open Atrium 2. We achieved our initial agenda on the second day and spent the remainder of the sprint digging into even more detailed issues. Here are some highlights:

Access Control [#1772844 Allow More Granular Permissions in the IPE]
The goal was to control access to the IPE so OA2 Group Owners could only customize their own group and section pages. Shoutout to merlinofchaos who worked closely with Matt on IRC to get this committed and adding [#1854374 Panels IPE needs additional permission for Page Manager] to Panels itself so Group Owners wouldn’t have access to customize landing pages such as the Home page.

Allowing Multiple templates [#1790434 Panelizer panel select tab (activated with 'allow panel choice') not appearing when adding a node."]
Open Atrium 2 needs the ability to define several default page templates for Section landing pages. A Panelizer option called “allow panel choice” was available, but the list of added templates never showed anywhere. Merlin committed #1790434 to expose the selection and a Panopoly issue [#1854182 Support Allow Panel Choice for Panelizer] was added to finish looking at the access rules when using multiple panel choices.

Context (Module) and Panels [#305289 Integration with Panels module]
Many people have considered Panels and Context (Module) to be two completely different (and opposing) methods to perform site building and layout. But I’ve always thought they could co-exist and found this old #305289 issue talking about integration. Panels and Context both have their own “access rules” or “conditions” that can be used to control whether “panes” or “blocks/boxes” are displayed. And while these two sets of condition rules overlap a great deal, there are still some contrib modules that set a particular Context condition that would be nice to use to control Panels panes. Turned out to be pretty easy to write a new CTools access plugin that fires whenever a specified Context is true. The plugin simply shows a list of all Contexts defined in the Context UI and allows you to select which ones you want to use. If any of the selected Contexts are set, then the CTools access plugin returns True to select the Panels pane using that selection rule. It’s a limited use-case, but now you can use the Context module to control which panes are displayed on your page within Panels.

Media module Accessibility [#1847912 Support Alt and Title for Media Integration]
Panopoly provides excellent integration with the Media module, but there was a specific issue around Accessibility and missing Alt and Title fields. We did some testing to get sylus‘s patch applied to enable Alt and Title fields for embedded media in WYSIWYG.

Inherited Profiles [#1356276 Make install profiles inheritable]
The Open Atrium 2 distribution profile will inherit from the Panopoly distribution. We continued testing work on the core patch needed to support inherited profiles. This patch needs some D8 testing so we can get it back-ported to D7. Frank spun up a D8 environment to test and we still need to track down a warning message before marking this as reviewed.

Apps
Open Atrium 2 will be heavily based on modular “Apps”. We had a discussion about Apps and came to consensus on how we want to handle Apps between Open Atrium 2 and Panopoly to ensure as much compatibility as possible. Will continue to have further discussions with other App providers later this month to get everybody on the same track.

Multilingual
Multilingual support is important to both Open Atrium and Panopoly. We performed some testing with multilingual content and language translations. This looks pretty clean so far with the current versions of the Internationalization (i18n) module suite, so no new issues were added.

Other
We discussed and added several other issues to the Panopoly queue that we will all continue to work on. There was a great commitment from Pantheon to help work on any Panopoly issues needed to make Open Atrium 2 a success!

Beyond the technical coding details, the sprint was a great chance to exchange information about Panopoly and Open Atrium 2 and build an even better partnership for the future. Open Atrium 2 is a true win-win project for both organizations and for the Drupal community at large and it was great to see community members come together to help with these issues. It’s exactly the spirit needed to make Open Atrium 2 a great success. I look forward to having continued involvement from the Panopoly team at Pantheon in the Open Atrium 2 project!

If you are interested in following Pantheon’s lead and sprinting with us on Open Atrium 2, either in here in DC or remotely, please contact us at [email protected].