I am building a site that targets several audiences, or groups if you will. Nodes can be associated with one or more of these groups. It is important that when one of these groups is accessed from the main nav, the context persists until another group is selected. The group will need to be exposed to panels so that I can pass the value to various included views. Each group also has certain styling associated.
What I have attempted so far is to use Organic Groups and Context modules. When you visit one of the group nodes, there is a context rule for each group which sets a class on the body. I can probably determine the group context in panels as well (haven't quite figured that out yet). This works mostly: I can access the same node from different group nodes and the body class changes accordingly.
The problem is this only works for authenticated users, which is useless to me as all visitors to the site will be anonymous. I feel like I am probably over complicating this and welcome any suggestions!
In essence, what I need it to be able to set an 'environment' globally using links in the main nav, which I can then access in panels and pass to the included views in order to filter content.
I ended up solving this by approaching the problem in a different way. I am now simply setting a session variable whenever the user hits one of the group term pages and then using it as a contextual filter in views. This creates a few more issues in my case but nothing that I don't know how to solve.