Views

merlinofchaos - November 25, 2005 - 12:34

The views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists of content (nodes) are presented. Traditionally, Drupal has hard-coded most of this, particularly in how taxonomy and tracker lists are formatted.

This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. It has four modes, plus a special mode, and provides an impressive amount of functionality from these modes.

You need Views if:

  • You like the default front page view, but you find you want to sort it differently.
  • You like the default taxonomy/term view, but you find you want to sort it differently; for example, alphabetically.
  • You use /tracker, but you want to restrict it to posts of a certain type.
  • You like the idea of the 'article' module, but it doesn't display articles the way you like.
  • You want a way to display a block with the 5 most recent posts of some particular type.
  • You want to provide 'unread forum posts'.
  • You want a monthly archive similar to the typical Movable Type/Wordpress archives that displays a link to the in the form of "Month, YYYY (X)" where X is the number of posts that month, and displays them in a block. The links lead to a simple list of posts for that month.

Views can do a lot more than that, but those are some of the obvious uses of Views.

Releases

Official releasesDateSizeLinks
5.x-1.62007-Jul-14207.36 KB
4.7.x-1.62007-Jul-14169.88 KB