Why Can't Panels Select My Organic Groups?

Question

I'm trying to create panels that are visible or show up on pages specific to certain groups. I'm using Organic Groups 7.x-2.7 on Drupal 7.34. So, our company's technicians would only see panels specific to them and the same for office staff. I'm having an issue integrating Panels with Organic Groups. When setting the "Selection Rules", "Visibility" or any other value for a panel to the group of the User who is viewing, the option to select the group is there and selectable BUT it only shows up as an empty string and the panel doesn't abide by this rule. I'm pulling my hair out and eating it in a mad attempt at proving to the gods of drupal code that I am worthy of a solution.

Update (3/20/15)

I changed my Organic Groups installation to version 1.5. This seems to work. I'll try each version incrementally until I reach the first one that breaks and just place it here. I still have no idea why this is occurring, though.

Answer 1

The way I accomplished this was with Views Contextual Filters and the Views Content Panes module, displaying only content belonging to the particular groups I wanted to see the content. This approach, however, requires the content being viewed to have a field instance of the group ID that it belongs to (and, incidentally, a field instance for "other" groups the content will be visible in). Note, in order for the two contextual filters to work properly here (i.e. for the content pane to be visible in two or more groups) I had to install the "Views Contextual Filters OR" module (I can't link twice because no rep).

I couldn't comment because I don't have enough rep, but this approach worked for me, but it might not work in your specific use case. It should be noted that if nothing matches the filter, the pane is omitted from display entirely (which is what you are ostensibly trying to accomplish). So many ways to skin a cat with Drupal.