Drupal 7 Panels Page Template Suggestion

The Drupal Panels Module is one of the best modules out there and provides flexible templating directly within the CMS. I recently worked on a site where I needed a default page.tpl.php for most of my pages, but a different page.tpl.php for my panel pages. Mainly, my regular pages need some padding around the main content area, while my panel page layouts dealt with that individually.

Madmatter23 provides some Drupal 6 code on his blog. It allows you to have a page–panel.tpl.php that will be used for your panel pages. I took that code and updated it for Drupal 7:

/**
 * Implementation of hook_preprocess_page().
 */
function theheap_preprocess_page(&$variables) {
  // if this is a panel page, add template suggestions
  if($panel_page = page_manager_get_current_page()) {
    // add a generic suggestion for all panel pages
    $variables['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'page__panel';
    
    // add the panel page machine name to the template suggestions
    $variables['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'page__' . $panel_page['name'];

    //add a body class for good measure
    $body_classes[] = 'page-panel';
  }
}

Madmatter23 also provides an additional (Drupal 6) snippet that will also add template suggestions for the specific layout of the panel page. I didn’t have a need for that, but if you need that functionality it should be very easy to port the few extra lines into my sample above.

That’s it!