This is related to bug 270360, but since the scope is different than what was previously reported and the proposed solution I thought it'd make sense to file this as a separate bug.

Dolphin treats folders differently depending on whether they're accessed via the main browser pane or the folder panel.  This isn't new behavior (it's been like this since the initial KDE 4.0 release, as far as I'm aware), but I don't think it's the correct behavior.  When I right-click on a directory, whether it's in the browser pane or in the folder panel, I should get all context menu options appropriate for a directory; instead, the context menu in the folder panel presents only a subset of available choices.

To illustrate, I've provided two attachments.  main-context-menu shows what options I have available when right-clicking on a directory in the browser pane.  I can perform standard file operations on that object, such as copy, paste, delete, viewing properties, etc., as well as creating subdirectories, opening in a new tab, and performing directory-specific actions such as opening it directly with other programs.

limited-context-menu.png, by contrast, shows the the options available when right-clicking on a directory in the folder panel.  It has the basic file management stuff - copy, paste, delete, rename, properties... and that's it.  None of the additional options that help make a GUI file manager like Dolphin so powerful are available.

Aside from the functional inconsistency, if I want to perform an action on a directory that's currently visible the folder panel (say, something that's a couple levels up from my $PWD), I have to actually left-click on the *parent* folder, then find and right-click on the target directory to perform the action that I wanted, then navigate back to my original directory.

From the comments in bug 270360 it sounds like there's a reason for this inconsistency, but I don't think it's a good behavior, and if there's a way to overcome it such that all context-menu options are available through the folder panel as well then Dolphin would be a better product (at least for those of us that still prefer to use a separate directory tree for managing files...).