I've been active on the Boston group on groups.drupal.org and found it pretty helpful until lately when such a massive geographical area posts so much content that the articles tick by too quickly. I've also been frustrated with the way the traditional river-o-news sorting tends to put dated events in whacked out orders. So i volunteered to workk with the new Groups and Panels integration to make a cooler Boston group page.

It's pretty neat. I haven't worked with Panels in a pretty long time but its awesome how I can carve up a page into some neat new layouts. I definitely appreciate the way it can let me do information design without having to do CSS or HTML. I can sorta just drag elements around on the edit layout, tweak a few settings on each element, and through trial and error get a great looking layout.

I've had clients, and you've had them too, who fancy themselves as web designers and have years of experience making web pages with MS Word. Panels is perfect for that guy.

So, I've had a lot of fun carving up the Boston group into some neat layouts, dumped in blocks for events and jobs and discussions, added some in-group taxonomy, disabled the standard groups block region, and have a test page that's looking pretty hot. It will be a few days yet until I feel right about switching it on since I asked for feedback first. Soon, though, soon...