Get Contextual - Maximise your website space with Panels and Views Arguments

Although the internet and websites are brilliant ways of finding information, there are a few unfortunate limitations (currently). Most of the time websites are restrained by size of screen and therefore what you put on your screen is vitally important. With so much data available, what people want is data that is related to what they are looking at. They want context to be IMPORTANT.

By using Panels and Arguments in Views through Drupal (6 or 7) you can make each of your pages (or pieces of content) contextual, with links, images, videos and even other parts of text around it remaining contextual.

I am going to give a small example of how you can use panels contexts and views arguments to display related images/content to the original node (or piece of content).

1. So you start out with the node template in panels.
2. If you can do that OK. That is part 1 done.
3. Add a new view and assign all the fields, styles you want
4. Add contextual filters to the view (selecting Taxonomy: Term ID).Add a “Content Pane”
5. Change the “Argument input” to Context.
6. Save the view
7. Go to the panel and add the content pane you have just made
8. Change Context setting in the field to Taxonomy term from node

Brilliant, you now have a contextual node