Book Image

Drupal 5 Views Recipes

Book Image

Drupal 5 Views Recipes

Overview of this book

The Drupal View modules give you flexibility and freedom to customize the display of your web site's content. Although there are more than 100 views-enabled modules, few site administrators use Drupal Views to its full potential. This book will enable you to realize the fullest potential of this powerful resource by providing a wide variety of powerful recipes for creating and displaying a wide variety of views ñ essential classics you will use again and again to innovative display methods that will make your Drupal site stand out. Pick and choose the ones you would like to prepare for your web site. In this book you will find ninety-four recipes to create a wide selection of views. The list includes event listings, interactive calendars and timelines, maps, proximity search, podcasting, carousels, Views Fusion, and many more. You will also explore default views, views with CCK, and master a variety of ways to associate views with related content. Most people think of Views for site visitors. But Views can also be handy for site administrators. You will get to know the Views Bulk Operations module, along with Editable Fields, and Views Custom Fields. (You'll probably wonder why you never used them before!) If you want to take Views to the next level, the book contains a code-rich chapter on theming. However, you will find most of the recipes detailed by the author do not require any original coding at all. As you progress through the recipes, you will be immersed in such Drupal Views topics as fields, arguments, filters, exposed filters, sorting, style plug-ins, formatters, cloning and copying views. Because Drupal is a worldwide and ever adapting system, the author also includes great tips and resources for navigating the online Drupal community and expanding your knowledge of the recipes. Finally, there is an extensive Appendix, which includes listings of all default views, formatters and style plug-ins for Drupal 5, along with a categorized list of patches.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Drupal 5 Views Recipes
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface
Default Views in Drupal 5 Modules
Formatters
Style Plugins
Views Hooks for Coders
Modules Included in Recipe Ingredients
Additional Resources and Modules Mentioned in Recipes
Selected Noteworthy Patches to Views
Index

Summary


We started this chapter exploring two ways to identify themeable functions on your site. First, we created a hyperlinked reference page, then we tracked the source names of themeable functions in the HTML source code.

We looked at a variety of approaches to control view appearance: CSS, theme overrides, template files, small custom modules, and the Views Theme Wizard.

Along the way, we were exposed to helpful code snippets for examining the contents of variables. Debugging code may be placed inside a view, inside a module, or inside various files that make up the theme.

We looked at ways to theme individual content types and individual views or view types. We spent a good deal of time looking at theme_pager and theme_views_view, exploring the use of the theme() function.

We had a chance to work with simplefeed, panels, a views carousel, and two ways to place views in tabs. We focused on the datestamp format for the CCK Date field, which eases special formatting for theming applications...