Spam: The other white meat

I'm working on a project where I need to get some of my custom content into Panels. Having the Panels interface to manage things is obviously a huge boon, but I wanted to do more than create Drupal blocks- I wanted the same kind of integration that modules like Views and CCK are using.

Poking around, I didn't find much information on how to actually write your own Panels integration, so after a few fits and starts, I just started from block.inc as an example and then have abstracted it here.

1) Having to redo Apache php configuration. Need to turn on the module and re-enable any directory overrides you have
2) MySQL is unhappy. Here are some notes:

#sudo /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM stop
#sudo mkdir /var/mysql/
#sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock
#sudo /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM start