Book Image

Drupal 6 Attachment Views

By : J. Ayen Green
Book Image

Drupal 6 Attachment Views

By: J. Ayen Green

Overview of this book

<p>The Drupal View modules give you the flexibility and freedom to customize the display of your web site's content. Defining custom content types is easy; however, it's also possible to use various content types in a complementary manner on the same page! Attachment displays in Views (also known as Attachment Views), are a way to customize your web site with multiple displays that interact with each other and turn a nice site into a spectacular one.<br /><br />This hands-on tutorial will teach Drupal developers across the experience spectrum how to use Attachment displays in Views, to make quick progress in functionality and added-value to users! Views are a common way to display a collection of similar content types on one page. What do you do if you want to display different content types simultaneously? What if you want to allow a user to interactively select which content they want, without using a menu? You can actually have more than one display within a view and views within a view.<br /><br />This book starts by introducing Attachment Views as reader activities. Here, we create a single Attachment View and take a closer look at giving each page an interactive feel. It also shows you to create a View with an Attachment View. Later, using practical examples, it helps you to develop a 3-view composite display using two and three custom content types. You will also be able to develop a composite display using multiple Attachment Views, to provide a control panel of sorts from which you can view the various content types. Finally, we will put the home page together making use of Views, blocks, a flash slide show, and other pieces.<br /><br />This book provides several examples of introducing additional displays onto a web page, and having them interact with each other. The result is pages that provide several types of information and behave more like a desktop application, increasing the value to your site visitors.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Drupal 6 Attachment Views
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Chapter 7. A Different 'About Us'

In this chapter, we're going to spice up what is typically a functionally flat page on most sites, the 'About Us' page. The site visitor will go to this page to get information about the company, but in our case, that information can be more than the typical company history blurb.

We're going to create a view with several displays, as follows:

  • A link from which to select to view the company history

  • An attachment display from which to select a biography

  • An attachment display from which to select an example of prior work

  • Page displays to present the selected record from each page display

At this point, we could export the views we have already made, combine the needed elements, and import them as a new view, but it would be too complicated to show and explain here, so we'll create it.

We're going to do something a little different than we have in the past couple of chapters; we'll make the small displays of selection lists the attachments, and the display of single...