Custom plugins can drastically change the page_manager experience, and the velocity of your development on sites. In this session we will discuss and give examples of creating customized plugins for various scenarios:

• Access paradigms
• Content display mechanisms
• Layout
• Style
• Context (and arguments and relationships)
• Custom pathing
• Custom page definitions

Primarily we’ll focus on access, content display and layout, but the others will at least be given in an few examples. The objective is to give attendees a practical introduction to the ctools plugin framework, and how it applies within page_manager/panels/etc. To accomplish this, we’re going to provide an example module that uses a handful of custom plugins, and page manager to create the same sort of features as content profile.

This module will have an access plugin for determining whether a user has created a node of a particular type, a layout plugin for displaying the content of the node type we’ll use and perhaps some custom display plugins for use with that node type as well. This will be provided as a sandbox on drupal.org for attendees to dissect in their own time. We will cover every custom plugin in class if the time allotted allows for it.