HOWTO: Creating Ctools Plugins for Panels and Related Modules

The Panels module and more recently the Chaos Tools (Ctools) toolset open up enormous power in using small plugins to accomplish user interface wonders. But it's been a bit of a black art knowing what you can do with a plugin and how to do it. But with a little bit of introduction and some sample code it's not too hard.

We'll cover:

• A quick introduction to plugins and where and how they're used
• The types of plugins: content types, arguments, contexts, access control and more
• How to wire up a few of these plugins
• Where Ctools plugins can be used

This is a code-intensive advanced workshop, so if you don't grok PHP it will probably be pretty boring.