From a general perspective: You must have just installed Drupal and the default website it creates. You have also added a few articles and assigned a descriptive term to each, that is, a category. Now, you would like to present the visitors with a page containing articles of a specific category. How do you do it? The short answer is...you can't...yet.

Alright, you decide to put that idea aside for now, and instead present all articles, but sorted by their titles. How do you do it? The short answer, again, is...you can't...yet.

The fact is that of the laundry list of thousands of functions available with Drupal, painstaking thoughts go into deciding which of them will be present "in core", that is, in the code when first installed, before anything else is added. Generally, the philosophy is that only the mission-critical functions should be present. Keeping the base platform light and fast is preferable to bloating it with functionality that can, instead, be added via contributed modules. Enter Views.

We will be exploring the capabilities of the Views module throughout the book, so for now, here is a short, in-a-nutshell definition of what this module offers.

Many would say that a fully functional Drupal site would be almost impossible to produce without the use of the Views module, and I agree. Now, do not take that as a challenge. Of course it would be possible to write custom modules in order to purposely accomplish a rich site without using the Views module, but why bother?

From a MySQL perspective: If you are not familiar with MySQL, it stands for My Structured Query Language and is the most used database with Drupal. The database contains Drupal's settings as well as the content added to the website.

So, let us say that we have a table in our database, and it is called node, and in this table we keep whatever content we have added to the website. If we want to retrieve all the content from this table, the command given to MySQL would be:

SELECT * FROM node;

This would return all the data stored in that table, each piece of content being a row (a record). If we wanted to retrieve only blog content, the command would be:

SELECT * FROM node WHERE node_type='blog';

If we want to sort the records by the title of the blog entries:

SELECT * FROM node WHERE node_type='blog' ORDER BY title;

Specifying that only three records are desired would be:

SELECT * FROM node WHERE node_type='blog' ORDER BY title LIMIT 0,3;

Finally, if there was another table, blog-topic, this table uses the same identifying value as the node table, nid (such as a driver's license number), and if we want to return its data along with the node data, we would relate the two records to each other, shown as follows:

SELECT * FROM node JOIN blog-topic ON node.nid=blog-topic.nid WHERE node_type='blog' ORDER BY title LIMIT 0,3;

Views does all that for you, as well as gives you many options to format its output to suit your needs.

Views is a particularly versatile module, in terms of interactions with the developer, who will use it in any or all of the following three ways:

Views offers many of the tools necessary for meeting your needs:

It is no wonder that Views is consistently the most popularly downloaded module at Drupal.org!

Chapter 1, Modifying Default Views, gives an introduction to the Views UI by modifying some of the views that come with the module in order to make useful versions of them.

Chapter 2, Basic Custom Views, covers creating elementary views and how to get them to provide the information you need.

Chapter 3, Intermediate Custom Views, goes beyond the basics to introduce concepts such as presenting teasers for a specific type of content, adding a header and footer, using AJAX for page changes, and producing custom links.

Chapter 4, Creating Advanced Views, covers advanced topics such as the use of multiple displays, using dynamic filters with depth, and restricting access to Views.

Chapter 5, Intermediate Custom Theming Views, shows you the various ways to manipulate the output of a view so that it has the look that you need.

Chapter 6, Creating Views Programmatically, shows how to create a view from within the module code rather than using the UI.

Chapter 7, Views Administration, covers some of the tools for administering your Views environment.

Appendix A, Installing Views, provides instructions for installing the Views module.

Appendix B, Entity Types and Fields, gives instructions for creating the various content types and other Drupal elements used in the recipes.

You will need a reasonably advanced computer and an Internet connection. All software required to do the recipes can be freely obtained from drupal.org.

This book is for developers or technically proficient users who are fairly comfortable with the concepts behind websites and the Drupal environment.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "However, we do not want to use that argument, because we will not be retrieving content based on the nid in the attachment, we will be retrieving content based on tid."

A block of code is set as follows:

<style type="text/css">
#cc-container {
  width: 180px;
}
.cc-odd, .cc-even {
  padding: 6px;
  border: 4px solid black;
  width: 120px;
  position: relative;
  text-align: center;
}
.cc-odd {
  left: 0;
  background-color: #aaa;
}
.cc-even {
  left: 60px;
  background-color: #eee;
}
.cc-value {
  font-size: 36px;
}
</style>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<?php foreach ($rows as $id => $row): ?>
  <div class="cc-<?php echo ($ctr % 2) ? 'odd' : 'even'; ?>">
      <?php $ctr--; ?>
      <div class="cc-value"><?php echo $ctr; ?></div>
      <div class="<?php print $classes_array[$id]; ?>">
        <?php print $row; ?>
      </div>
  </div>
<?php endforeach; ?>

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: " Click on the Title link in the Title box and change the title to Recent article comments, and then click on the Update button."

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