How to print a message when a Pane is empty? I've rewritten the node pages on my website with a Panel page (using node_edit) and added the node's comments as a Pane. When no comments have been published yet, the Pane is hidden. However, I'd like to still display the Pane's title and a sentence underneath that says something like: Be the first to react.

I already have a template panels-pane--node-comments.tpl.php and added some lines under if(!$content}{print t('Be the first to react.');}, but as the Pane isn't displayed, the template isn't activated. What should I do?

I know that I could create a View that shows all the node's comments and set a value when there aren't any, but maybe that's overkill?
Create a new pane with that text and set a visibility rule on it - there should be an existing rule that you can use. If not a ctools rule plugin is pretty simple to write and you can have that rule plugin check to see if comment count is 0.