Views. Huh! What is it good for?

Of the 16,000+ modules on drupal.org views has been in the number one spot on the most used module’s list since Drupal 4.7. Ask any site builder to recommend module’s that they can’t live without and views will likely be the first one they mention and will always be in the top 5. Why?

Drupal itself is really good at collecting content and providing various ways to structure and store your data. Out of the box however there just aren’t that many options for getting that data back out of the database and displaying it. Tired of Drupal’s somewhat limited in configuration options river-of-news style front page? Enter views. The Drupal list building tool.

In this session we’ll take a look at the problems the views module tries to solve and how it does so. Then we’ll discuss the components that make up a view and how they all fit together. In order to make the most of a tool it’s important to know what each piece does. We’ll take a look at the administration interface for views and get you started down the path to make your own lists, tables, calendars, RSS feeds and more. Finally we’ll talk about a few other modules that extend views and make it even more useful.

This session is geared towards people who have either never used or have only a basic understanding of the views module and are ready to start exploring how to make their own custom listing pages. As well as people new to Drupal as it will touch on some the key site building techniques in use by most Drupal sites today.

Questions answered by this session:

• What is the views module and why is it so popular?
• How can I replace Drupal’s default front page with something that is more configurable?
• The difference between displays, context, filters, fields and other views terminology
• How to get started building a view.
• How to extend the views module to make it even more useful.