Drupal – Customize Node Template with Panel

Panels is a very useful module for customizing page layout. You can either create you own page or edit the Drupal default templates such as Node View and Taxonomy View. Download the Panels and Chaos Tool Suite and enable the following options.

• Chaos Tool Suite
  • Custom content panes
  • Page manager
  • Views content panes
• Panels
  • Panels

Now you could create a new View with a display called content pane. I setup the following content pane display which show all the songs of a singer. The song content type has a node reference field which is associated with a singer node. An if a singer node id is provided in the argument, only the songs of that singer will be shown.

 

Since we want to show this content pane in the Singer Node, we would read the first argument of the node view URL to get the singer node id. So i configure the argument input as follow.

 

The content pane is ready now. Let’s setup the Node View template. Enable the node_view template @ Administer -> Site building -> Pages.

 

Create a new Variant called Singer and set the selection rule such that this variant is applied on the Singer node type only.

 

Pick any layout in Layout setting and add the content pane which we created previously in Content setting.

 

Save the setting and take a look on the singer nodes.

 

Done =)

Reference:

• Drupal Module – Panels
• Drupal Module – Chaos Tool Suite