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What you want, out-of-the-box!

An introduction to Panopoly and Drupal distributions

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About David Snopek

Freelance Drupal developer
Co-maintainer of Panopoly (and 20-ish other Open Source projects on Drupal.org)

http://mvpcreator.com

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What can you build with Drupal?

Personal blog
E-commerce store
Company website
Intranet collaboration portal
Social networking site
Video sharing site
… etc … (unlimited possibilities!)

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What does Drupal give you out of the box?

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Nobody wants this thing!

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Most people want a thing that already feels like a website, and ...

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… that has core functionality they need!

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They want something closer to their end goal out-of-the-box

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And they want to replicate that 10x

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What is a Drupal “distribution”?

Drupal prepackaged with contrib modules and themes, pre-configured for a specific use case
Install it just like Drupal
But out of the box ... it does something!
It’s still Drupal so you can continue to configure it and extend to meet you needs

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Popular Open Source Distributions

Commerce Kickstart: e-commerce store
Open Public: government websites
Open Atrium: company intranet
Drupal Commons: online community
Open Academy: university department sites
Julio: school and high school websites
Demo Framework: sales tool (for Drupal)
ERPAL: internal PM and ERP tool
Panopoly: MAGIC! (more on this soon!)

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Lots of internal distributions too!

Custom distribution for internal use
Examples:

UC Berkley
Canadian government
NBC
ASU WebSpark
… who knows how many others!

Even small to medium-sized organizations can benefit from creating an internal distribution.

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Reasons to use an internal distro

Reduce boilerplate work every time (ex. Drupal shops)
Build and configure once, deploy many times (ex. university, government)
Make updates to the distribution, re-deploy and update all sites

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What is Panopoly?

A “starter site” distribution with lots of basic improvements to Drupal (ex. WYSIWYG, Media, responsive layouts, etc...) + Panels
A “base distribution” on which to build other distributions
A set of Features modules that can be used outside of Panopoly (ie. use just the panopoly_wysiwyg module)

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User eXperience (UX) principles

Do the obvious things out-of-the-box
Keep users and site managers on the frontend and off the backend

Edit things where they’re displayed

Keep Drupal-isms behind the scenes

Shouldn’t need to know what a “View”, “Block”, “Panel”, “Context”, etc are

WYSIWYG all the things

Show (live) previews wherever possible

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But it uses Panels, right? Eeeew!

Lots of love AND hate for Panels
Panopoly includes the best of the Panels eco-system

Panelizer, Fieldable Panel Panes, Panels IPE

… but hides the nasty from users

Users will never see Page Manager (use IPE instead)!

Create amazing user experiences that your users will love

… while writing very little code (Views, FPP, Panelizer)

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The features of Panopoly!

Show me the money

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Panopoly enables necessary modules (and updates them!)

Views

Link

Media

Libraries

Date

Pathauto

Entity API

WYSIWYG

Search API

Features

Panels

Panelizer

FAPE

CTools

Admin Views

Module Filter

Fieldable Panel Panes

Save Draft

Libraries

LinkIt

JQuery Update

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Panopoly defines common layouts

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Panopoly facets search results

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Panopoly configures the WYSIWYG

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Panopoly improves the content editing page

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Panopoly creates landing pages

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Panopoly allows pages to be customized

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Panopoly makes it easy to add page content

“Add an Image”, “Add a video”, etc
There’s probably 100 ways to add an “Image” to a page via Drupal, but it can be difficult for clients on their own
Do you teach them how to use the Structure -> Blocks page? Or some other Drupalism? Or do they have to ask you to do that?
These are the “widgets” that Panopoly provides to end-users by default, they’re all things that clients would know and understand
And they can just add them to the page they are looking at from the that very page and see the result in realtime
They don’t have to go to the Drupal backend or even refreshing the page

BTW, these widgets are “Fieldable Panel Panes” or “Views”
And if you’re creating a site for your client, you can remove things from here OR add special new things for that particular use case
And since that’s either with Entities/Fields or Views, site builders can create new widgets for your clients and put them into Features, without writing any code

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Panopoly lets end users customize things

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Panopoly guides distribution development

If you’re building a distribution based on Panopoly, we’ve got you
For site builders: you can build new cool things or customize what Panopoly does without needing to write code

You can do it with Views, Panelizer, Entities and Fields and put that into Features or Features Override
Also, you’ve got a set of cool widgets and layouts to depend on right away

For developers:

Even if your implementing something custom in custom code (rather than Views / Panels) in a Panopoly world you’d expose that to your users via Panels as a CTools plugin
If you want to add a new layout, style or widget, that’s a CTools plugin

But the bottom line is this: Your distributions will provide default functionality for your specific use-case, but YOU KNOW your users are going to want to customize things

Panopoly provides a framework for the users to customize things
You provide some widgets, styles and layouts for your stuff
Users if they want, can just start moving them around and clicking the settings button to get the setting you provide or them, and changing whatever they want
This is all built in

And Panopoly helps with a bunch of nitty gritty details, like creating the boilerplate code, and examples for how to handle demo content, and so on

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Distributions built on Panopoly

Open Atrium: company intranet
Open Academy: university department sites
Demo Framework: sales tool (for Drupal)
Open Church: church websites
Restaurant: restaurant websites
PushTape: for musician websites
MVPcreator: startup MVPs
Web Experience Toolkit: Canadian gov’ment
ASU WebSpark: Arizona State University

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Credits

Shout out to the other co-maintainers:

Matt Cheney, Co-founder at Pantheon Systems (lead maintainer of Panopoly)
Tom Kirkpatrick, Co-founder System Seed (maintainer of Open Academy)

Shout out to the Panopoly community!

Loads of contributors writing/reviewing patches everyday as well as providing support in issue queue

Matt Cheney’s presentation at DrupalCon Portland 2013

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REMINDERS!

Evaluate my presentation! Go to austin2014.drupal.org/schedule, find my presentation and click button to evaluate!

Panopoly sprint on Friday! Please join us to try out Panopoly and help make it better. ;-)

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Questions?