Project

  • For people who might not know, what is a Drupal distribution?

    • Out of the box, vanilla Drupal doesn’t do much - you have to install modules and mold it into what you want
    • A distribution is Drupal prepackaged with contrib modules and themes, pre-configured for a specific use case (OOB, X+Y)
  • What is Panopoly?

    • A “starter site” distribution (replacement for vanilla Drupal)
    • A “base distribution” on which to build other distributions
    • A set of Features modules that can be used outside of Panopoly
  • Why would someone want to use Panopoly instead of vanilla Drupal?

    • Improved blank slate
    • Includes some the most popular modules and configuration that almost everyone is using anyway
    • Hide Drupal-isms from site managers and users
    • WYSIWYG, Media, responsive layouts, edit in place, live previews, improved search, UX improvements, a11y improvements
    • Include a bunch of stuff backported from D8: toolbar, responsive bartik, etc
    • Unified content/layout management system built on Panels eco-system
    • Rather than learning all that community knowledge over, re-use a well thought out, tested approach to doing Drupal
  • Some people love Panels, but others hate it. Why would someone who isn’t a “Panels lover” want to use Panopoly?

    • Best of Panels eco-system
    • You build with Views, Entities/Fields, custom code, whatever - the Panels bits tie those things together and allow users to customize them
    • We hide the nastiest bits (page_manager UI) from users and site managers
  • Why would someone want to create their own distro?

    • Boilerplate, build once / deploy lots, maintenance of lots of sites
    • Even small organizations can benefit
  • What advantages do you get by build your distro on Panopoly?

    • Like “base theme” shared work (like WYSIWYG, responsive, etc) and defined approach
    • Focus only on the unique stuff in your distro (by fitting into Panopoly’s architecture)
  • Why would someone want to use one of Panopoly’s Features modules outside of Panopoly?

    • [Quick background on Feature]
    • Dozen or so features
    • If like just a piece of Panopoly (ex. panopoly_wysiwyg) you could steal it!
    • Lots of thought into buttons to enable, filtering for control/security, additional features like Media/Linkit
  • Updating distributions can be hard. What does Panopoly do to help with this?

    • [explain why hard]
    • Docs
    • CI
    • distro_update
  • Security updates in particular can be hard, because you have to wait for the distro to make its own update. How does Panopoly handle them?

    • [mention how handled in the past / security team]
  • What are the plans for Panopoly in Drupal 8?