Panels (http://drupal.org/project/panels)

merlinofchaos

I was inspired by a client (Lee LeFever of CommonCraft) to give this module a shot. As a developer, the temptation is often to create something from scratch - Lee has done a great job in showing the power and flexibility that Drupal offers from administration alone. Commoncraft has a zeitgeist based on the Panels module that aggregates a bunch of web account feeds in one place (you can see it in action here). To familarize myself with this module, I'm going to try to copy what Lee has done (sorry Lee!)

The module installation is straight forward. Panels does not create a new content type, instead opting to add a new section under Site Building. Internet Explorer can have problems with the CSS styling of Panels pages. If your theme is having trouble in IE, a helpful fix is included in the README.TXT file for making sure that panels stack properly.

Because Panels are added and configured through their own handler, creating Panels pages could be confusing to end users. After selecting a layout, we're taken to a page that allows you to add content to the resulting page. On my installation, blocks, nodes, and views are all available for addition.

For demonstration purposes, I've created a panel "zeitgeist" for myself (available here: Vancouver Tech Guy's Zeitgeist). I inserted the "About Me" node to put all the streaming data in context. I added a tag cloud block to show which types of content I'm currently writing about. To round things out, I added a block containing code from wholinked.com. Total time was 4 minutes (most of which was finding the snippet from wholinked.com). Speedy.

A great module, Panels lets those without coding experience create very interesting pages. You can combine multiple nodes, show a bunch of views, or create a "zeitgeist" page filled with your favorite javascript snippets.