We’ve had a whole bunch of cool suggestions for the highlights module. And I’m keen to start playing with it as soon as I have fixed some of these strange, ‘boogey man’-like bugs and refactored some of the key files. I wanted to document my thoughts on this here so that you guys have the opportunity to comment and steer me in the direction you think this should go.

Two considerations have to be made here. One is to the end user, the other to the theme developer.

For the end user, the possibility of adding Highlights (or features) to their home page via One Panel would be fantastic. One of the things mentioned in the ‘Change You Want to See‘ post was the ability to specify whether you wanted to feature a post, or page, video, external link, RSS feed, etc. But another cool feature would be the ability to create a ‘Slide Show‘ highlight, allowing you to add whatever you wanted to that highlight and define its position on the page.

I also need to think a little more about Highlight Behavior, as numerous users have presented discomfort about the way certain highlights work. An example would be randomization of the featured post, or displaying certain posts within a featured category. Both would add a new degree of freedom to One Panel that seems to be desirable to you guys right now.

With regards to the theme developers: Currently I am unaware of anyone using the One Panel theme API, and I’m pretty sure no-one is, due to the fact that it is yet to be documented properly. However it is possible by back engineering the onepanel_config.php file in any of our theme folders.  The problem for the theme developer is ensuring that the theme renders correctly, and allowing advanced user control to add and remove highlights as they see fit. Opening up the door for a whole load of CSS issues that I’m sure wouldn’t be appreciated.

There may be some respite here however if we allow the theme developer to force their own Highlight structure using something along the lines of…

OnePanelConfig::ForceHighlightStructure();

Another idea might be to create some kind of rendering policy for each highight, such as Primary (full width), Secondary (two per row), Tertiary, Sidebar. This would allow the theme developer to code containers for whatever the user could throw at One Panel. Or so the hope would be…