Drupal’s Building Blocks: Quickly Building Web Sites with CCK, Views, and Panels

11. Views API

In this chapter, we explore the nuts and bolts of how Views is put together, and we get our hands dirty talking seriously about PHP code. Each view consists of a staggering number of moving parts, all of which have to be assembled in the right place at the right time to give the user the final output. In addition, all of these parts need to support a user interface where each piece could need its own configuration. The cost of this flexibility, of course, is a long list of parts that are included, plus a broad ability to extend this list by other modules. In essence, Views follows the Drupal core model of modularity but uses a very different architecture than the Drupal core itself uses.

Data Architecture

The Drupal core uses ...