Beginning Drupal®

Chapter 11. Views

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Exploring and modifying default views, including Drupal's default frontpage

• Unraveling fields, filters, and sort criteria

• Creating a photo gallery using views

• Understanding Views arguments

• Using exposed filters

• Creating custom administrative pages and reports using Views

• Understanding relationships in Views

The brainchild of Earl Miles and made possible by a great community of developers, the contributed module Views has quickly become a necessity for almost all Drupal websites. Views is a query builder that reaches into your database and pulls out your data, and then sorts it, filters it, rearranges it, and molds it into whatever form you want. It is a highly customizable module that creates lists, tables, pages, blocks, RSS feeds, and more in order to showcase your site's content, users, files, images, and nearly anything else you have on your site. No programming is required.

This chapter starts with a high-level overview and then unpeels the layers of views through a series of exercises. You should complete the exercises in succession, because each one builds upon the work of the others. At the end of this chapter, you'll walk away understanding how Views works and how you can make it do what you want.

ADVANCED HELP

Earl and the developers of Views have gone beyond the call of duty by heavily documenting the use of the module. The Advanced Help module adds pages of free documentation right into the Views interface to help guide you ...