Gpanels Busted for Illegal Steriod Use, but OMG what a Performance!

As promised today we roll out the all new Gpanels - nine in total, five more than the original four released in Genesis. These will be released in AdaptiveTheme RC4 shortly and will be included in the next version of Genesis as well.

For those of you not up to speed with Gpanels they are snippets of HTML and PHP that you drop into page.tpl.php and display multi column fluid grids. You then place blocks into each grid region, which display in vertical columns. You can read all about Gpanels in the documentation (slightly outdated by this update, but the theory and use holds true).

The big advantage of Gpanels is speed and percentage widths— it does not matter what the width of your page is they will always display in a grids like manner.

We developed Gpanels in response to the growing desire for many Drupal themes to display blocks side by side in columns, such as a four column layout in the footer.

We have made some minor changes to the layout CSS, the most obvious being the abandonment of accurate display in Opera. They do not break but because of the (idiotic) way Opera rounds down percentages the gutters and overall widths are slightly different to every other browser, i.e. they render identically in IE6,7 and 8, Gecko and Webkit. In the original Gpanels there was a lot of effort put into supporting Opera however this time around I chose simplicity and progressive enhancement over supporting what I believe to be a serious flaw in Opera.

The full complement includes:

• Two column 2x50%
• Two column 33%, 66%
• Two column 66%, 33%
• Three column 3x33%
• Three column 25%, 25%, 50%
• Three column 50%, 25%, 25%
• Four column 4x25%
• Five column 5x20%
• Six column 6x16%

FYI, this brings the total number of available regions in Adaptivetheme to 42! And of course you can reuse Gpanels, print them more than once in a page (no id’s, only class selectors are used), embed them in nodes or other regions etc etc.

So heres a screeny of the whole shebang…