Panels and Views

I’ve had conversations with friends who work with Drupal and they all talk about a sort of “epiphany” experience where they seem to finally “get” Drupal. I’ve had a couple of them. The first one was when I finally got my head around the concept of database driven non-static content. I had to have that to move on. I’ve been in IT for a long time but on the infrastructure side. The web stuff that I have always dealt with has been very simple really. So I had to get over that.

Now, I’ve had a new sort of epiphany. And it was the result of learning enough about Drupal to see that, for me, the paradigm of “Blocks” is a dead end. For me, I had to learn enough to see that Views and Panels are the way to go. There are some little things about this that are good examples. One. If you build a menu item from an Aggregator Category item, then change that item name, that change won’t be reflected in the menu; you have to go and change the menu link name as well. no good. But if the menu link item is based off of a View, that View can hold all of the relevant data for what appears on the menu.

So, LEARN VIEWS and PANELS.