Is Panels necessary in Drupal 7?

Question

A bit of explanation - I'm a Drupal 6 developer who has never used Panels, but was looking at it for a new site that I was going to initially build in D6, but am now going to build in D7 since the modules I need all seem to be available.

This will be my first D7 site.

For this site I was going to use Panels in D6 for the following reasons:

• The majority of the pages in the site will have a sidebar, but the composition of that sidebar will vary, and the 'content area' may be subdivided in up to 3 divisions, either in 1+1+1 or 2+1, including back and forth from one to the other in the same page (ie 2+1 on top of 1+1+1).
• The homepage will be completely different and have its own layout.
• Some pages, such as the forum, will be "full-width" and will have no sidebar whatsoever.

It seemed like Panels could accomplish all of these (if not, that would be good to know :-).

In Drupal 7, is Panels still a good bet for this, or is there a better way? It seems beyond what my understanding of simple blocks and regions can do, but I may be wrong...

Answer 1

It's all possible with regular blocks and regions, Panels is just much easier to administer, and has the added advantage of being exportable.

Answer 2

Although its possible to achieve the results without using Panels at all as indicated by mirzu's answer above but I would highly recommend you to use Panels module, because Panels are nothing but visual page builders that allow you to change your page's layout by simple drag and drop. You can define and customize your layouts easily (without touching any CSS or HTML) right from the front end.

Panels also allow you to embed content (views, nodes, mini-panels etc) within regions that you can specify in the layout which allows tremendous page customization.

IMHO Panels module is quite easy to configure and saves a lot of time and you should use it instead of the block/region combination.