How to split up a View up amongst different Panels panes? Context display?

Question

I know there's a way to take a view, and then put different slices into different panes in Panels or Page Manager. I've done it before, but not for a few years now.

I thought it was something that Views and Panels did 'out of the box', and I'm sure the Context module stopped being necessary a few years ago, but it's possible that's changed. I'm sure it involved a special type of views display (not blocks or pages, I think it was called a context display) then loading the view as a context in Panels/Page Manager. Then, each pane had appropriate options to choose the range of records e.g. 1-3 in one, then 4-6 in another, etc.

However, I have no such options in Views or Panels, and despite having a wealth of possible search terms here, I can't find the crucial step to enable this. It doesn't help that the word context is used in so many other contexts, I'm getting a wall of unrelated search results.

Did I remember this right, and if so, what do I need to do to access this "context display mode" in views that allows me to chop up the view in Panels?

Answer 1

The module I needed to enable was Views content panes. I was looking for something like it in the Views and Panels section of the modules list - it was in neither, it's bundled with ctools and listed under Chaos Tools Suite.

Then, once enabled, you get two new Views display mode options:

• Context is the one to allow a view to be loaded as a context behind a panel.
• Content pane is like a smart block where you can allow settings to be set per panel pane (e.g. offset and pager, allowing the view to be sliced up), toggling fields on and off, changing titles, etc. A few gotchas:
  • All such options are disabled from being edited in Panels by default, you have to enable them each time using the "Allow settings" option in the middle in Views
  • Panels can be a bit fussy about showing newly added view panes. You might need to save/update the panel/page manager page before it'll register the new view displays, even though it seems to load everything new each time. If even that doesn't work, try clearing caches.