What are efficient solutions to prevent a huge amount of panes in a Panel?

Question

Using Panels for some years I still have one question that I struggle with.

I have set up a Panel with a special layout, with a filter on a specific bundle type.

I have more than 10 views content panes that I want to show in that panel, but each one on its own entity.

So the obvious solution is to add Pane Visibility Rules to each of the panes, which filter by URL of the entity.

I think this is neither efficient nor userfriendly. It's hard to manage for more than 10 panes and have a clear insight about all the visibility rules of each pane.

I thought about using ViewField module for the entities showing a specific view, and still allow them to use the Panel. As far as I can see, that does not allow for the use of the Panel pane context tokens.

Suggestions are very welcome.

Answer 1

Panels have "varients" with selection rules. You can set up which variant is triggered by which value in the url variable that you named in the path setup. This way, you can have your pane layouts not get so cluttered with options that are only visible a fraction of the time, but still have the same capability. Either way, the check for display is a growth order of O(1) so not that much of an efficiency concern. The views would be a better place to increase efficiency, set a limit and a link to the full list in a footer.