I am working on a Secret Project and have a newbiesh Drupal 6 question.
We have three kinds of content (maybe determined by content type, maybe determined by taxonomy or something else). Let's call them "Intro", "Posts", and "Links". Each of these types of content has a tag.
I have a view that will pull all of the content with the same tag. I can sort this content by the content type, which gives me a list in the right order: first all of the Intro entries, then all of the Posts entries, then all of the Links entries. But this is a single list, which makes styling the different kinds of content differently difficult. I want to lay these different kinds of content out on the page and style them differently. However, I want to have the flexibility of omitting certain types: if there are no Posts for a page, then the users should see the "Intro" and "Links" section without embarrassing gaps or unneccessary headers in between.
My guess is that the Drupalish way of doing this is to use Panels (and somehow combine them with a View). Is this correct?
Are there other alternatives I should consider for this relatively simple case?
Some Drupal User Group members hate Panels because they are inefficient. Should I be worried?
I have also heard that Panels are hard to set up, but I guess I am going to see this for myself shortly.
I would appreciate any pointers or tips.
- Paul
