Design and Prototyping for Drupal

Views

Views helps you create lists of content to put in various places on your site. As you will see in the practical examples in Chapters 12 and 13, I used Views to create a custom “Who’s Hosting” block for my Event page, with user profile information based on a User reference field. I also used it to create a block of related events for the sidebar, and a list of categories for events with associated images. Views works by setting up your defaults (what Views is pulling out of the database) and parsing it into different displays depending on your needs. Anywhere you have a list of content, you likely have a View.

For example, Figure 9-1 shows the home page of our site for Urban Homesteaders Unite.

Figure 9-1. Our rough homepage mockup for UHU, with annotations

If I break this down according to the numbers that I’ve annotated on my layout, I’ll see:

• 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are all blocks.

• 2, 7, and 8 are blocks built with Views.

• There’s no actual node content on the home page.

• 3 is a menu, and comes from the Menu core system.

There’s no hard and fast way to know exactly where a bit of content is coming from on the page (for example, depending on the regions in your theme, block #6 could actually be coming in as content from the home page; I’m creating it as a block because it’s easier to theme that way), but there’s a few things that it’s safe to assume:

• Anything that is in the menu bar comes ...