Presentation to the Boulder DBUG meeting on Nov. 13, 2013. Using Panopoly as the base Drupal 7 install saves time and vastly improves the content editing experience on the site. We also discussed how to add Panopoly to an existing site.
5. What is Panopoly?
• Distribution Developed by Pantheon
• “Attempt to move up the stack”
• Put in foundation & basics: “start building from the 3rd floor”
• Contains essential modules
• Preconfigured & patched
• Solve a lot of your base problems
• “Best of the config module space”
• D8 features in D7
• Opinionated
• Build your own distribution
6. Why use Panopoly?
D7 out of the box
Panopoly out of the box
• No Views
• Views
• No wysiwyg (and hard to
• TinyMCE well-integrated
set up)
• No layout control
• No media, slideshow; add
yourself
• Not responsive
• Extensive panels
integration
• Common media add-ons
(slideshow, youtube, etc.)
• Responsive
7. Some features
• WYSIWYG built-in and integrated
• Image, media, link plugins
• Security (tag filters, etc.)
• Layout flexibility with good UI
• Landing pages can be created by non-tech users
• UX features for content editors
• Responsive
• Search (Solr, search API)
• Designed as base
• Not tied to theme layer
• Modular: Turn off what you don’t need
• Easy to extend to build your own distro
• Apps for adding prefab capabilities (blog,
9. How to get it
• Download from https://drupal.org/project/panopoly and
install just like regular Drupal
• drush dl panopoly
• Try online with Pantheon: getpantheon.com
• Project Quicksilver installs Panopoly by default:
github.com/rdickert/project-quicksilver
12. Issues with the existing site
• Front page with panels
• Fragile
• Obscure method to edit
• No one else can change it
• Views slide show – poor admin experience
• Hard to customize
• Media – not a great experience
• e.g., Couldn’t attach files in text (config issue?)
• Content editors frustrated, page content easily broken
• Dependent on one guy – me.
13. Adding Panopoly: concerns
• Site was not up to date (core/modules)
• Already using many contrib modules used by Panopoly
• Using CKEditor (Panopoly uses TinyMCE)
• Would my theme break?
14. The battle plan
• See drupal.org/node/1717728
• Work on a duplicate on a vm
• Get a module list:
• drush pm-list --type=Module --status=enabled
• Compare to the Panopoly contrib list
• Delete matching from directory
• Replace with Panopoly and enable Panopoly
• drush dl panopoly
• drush en panopoly_admin panopoly_core panopoly_images
panopoly_magic panopoly_theme panopoly_users
panopoly_widgets panopoly_pages panopoly_search
panopoly_wysiwyg
15. Some Details
• Requires drush and some command line skills – not for
the faint of heart.
• Panopoly directory: /profiles/panopoly
• Must set profile
• drush vset -y install_profile panopoly
• “Also you should” – tells Drupal to run db updates
• echo "UPDATE system s SET schema_version = 0 WHERE
s.name = ’panopoly'" | drush sqlc && drush cc all
16. Problems encountered
And some occasionally questionable solutions…
• Media & entity modules have problems
• Solution: disable them before Panopoly enable
• Update scripts fail trying to create tables that already exist
• Solution: Manually drop the tables and rerun update (there must be
a better way…) – suggestion from the meetup: tryDrush Registry
Rebuild
• APC module endlessly warns about not clearing
• Solution: Monkey-patch code to delete the useless warning
• Panelizer update script fails
• Patched from drupal.org/comment/7796677#comment-7796677
• Panopoly Search just won’t install
• Not really needed on this site: Left it off.
17. Success!
(mostly)
• Took 20-30 hours for a noob. YMMV, but not trivial.
• Required some config adjustments (text styles, enabled
editor buttons, etc.)
• Result: Close to the full Panopoly experience.
• Outcomes of original concerns:
• Code update: was able to get everything up-to-date no problem
• Conflicting modules: caused pain (esp media), but overcame
• CKEditor: magically changed over – non-issue
• Theme: Also a non-issue. Theme change is next…
18. Conclusions
• Upgrading an existing site is possible but difficult.
• For a small from-scratch site, starting with Panopoly is a
no-brainer. Treat it as “core Drupal” and build from there.
• Combine Panopoly with a lean VPS for the best Drupal
experience.
• Small-site Drupal 7 is beginning to overcome its
limitations. You can have a fast, inexpensive ($5-10/mo),
easy-to-use base Drupal site in minutes if you have the
skills.
• We need to strongly encourage people trying Drupal for
the first time to avoid the base distro and use Panopoly or
other good distributions.
