Milestones for Panels + Organic Groups integration

The Post Carbon Institute graciously offerred to sponsor me to integrate Panels and Organic Groups modules. Here is brief milestone plan:

One custom panel for each group node type

This functionality exists today without any changes to either og or panels. In order to complete this milestone, Moshe shall document the steps required to achieve this. The documentation should include screenshots and help text.

Multiple custom panels for a given group, created by a group admin. Admin chooses which one is his group home page.

Here we introduce a new module, og_panels, which ships with og. It lets group admins create/edit displays which are attached to group. The implementation will resemble the integration of display customization in panels_node.module. Displays are stored in the usual panels_displays table and the mapping of display to group is done in a new table managed by this module. When displaying a group homepage, we will use nodeapi(view) to render our display if so configured. og_nodeapi() will gracefully get out of the way in this case.

Optimize the panel creation UI for group admins. Remove cruft.

The panel UI might confuse group admins at first. Do whatever is reasonable to mitigate this confusion. This may require patches from Panels project.

Future

• Let group posts (i.e. not group homepage) get own panel. In other words, a group post will look different from a non group post. For example, they might show the list of recent posts from each affiliated group in a section of the page.
• Let group admins submit new layouts for panels. I suspect they will not use PHP but rather an email variables syntax like @left-2 for a given pane.
• Let admins submit custom CSS for their group.