Drupal Modules

Break out of your site template without doing your head in.

This module is a great plug-in for designing custom pages quickly. Ideal for:

• creating pages that fall outside any of your content templates (but for which you still want the normal site page layout - navigation, header, footer etc).
• developers who already write/use site-specific custom modules for displaying/adjusting pages, nodes and blocks.
• developers that find panels a bit unwieldy (pure personal preference), or want greater control over their html.
• casual developers that want to programmatically display content in the most common formats (eg views, blocks).

I've found that when using panels for a project, my project tends to get quite unwieldy as the project evolves - blocks, views and design overrides specific to a single page end up stored in multiple places in code (theme and custom module), and in the database (via block/view/panels/whatever admin interface). This may well be down to sloppy development, or lack of knowledge or experience of panels best practice, or it may be that I'm actually choosing the appropriate drupal way for individual design decisions; regardless, synchronisation between dev, test and live, not to mention troubleshooting become a bit of a headache.

Custom page doesn't solve all my lazy-programming issues, but it lets me put all design html specific to a single page into just one file, making release and trouble-shooting WAY easier.

The module also provides a bunch of php helper functions for displaying nodes, blocks, views and menus (check custompage_util.inc).

Super-easy to use - add the template file to your theme folder, then create the page through the admin interface. That's all. Just make sure you read the help about hyphens/underscores.

The one thing I think custompage is missing is an option to automatically create a menu item for a page, similar to views pages.

Review by heathergaye [info] on September 21, 2010 - 03:26