More on Variants for the node add/edit forms

So I have Forums, Blogs and Galleries. And I want to style each one differently. So my first thought is to put the form inside of a Panel Page so that I can add other content. And that is the right direction, but it isn’t enough.

The Node Add/Edit form is already in the Page Manager as a Panel Page. It is disabled by default. By enabling it, I will have the ability to customize the form’s display. I already explained the part about the contexts

method of determining what node type will be affected by the change. But here is something to keep in mind.

If you enable the page, and then create a variant for a content type to be used (when you add a node to that content type for example) you will find that the add form for ALL content types looks like the variant you created for example, for the Blog entry content type.

You will need to create a variant for each of the content types individually or they will all inherit the one variant’s customizations. and what I had to do to make THAT work properly was to use a selection rule for the variants that come at the beginning of the list. Since variant order determines in a large part, what is applied, you have to create selectors so that the “filtering” process works properly.

This is one of Drupal’s great strengths, but it is also kinda strange to me and took a while for me to get my head around. Look at the SS. Each of the three content types has a variant. and a context that applies to it. But, without a Selection Rule that also applies to it, the variant will simply inherit its appearance from a rule above it, the first one that happens to apply. There are other ways to do these same things with selection rules