Tutorial for view Module

How to work with drupal view

What is Views

The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content (nodes in Views 1, almost anything in Views 2) 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.
Among other things, Views can be used to generate reports, create summaries, and display collections of images and other content.

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.



This screencast covers the installation and configuration of the views module, as well as:

• Creating a new view (both page and block)
• Adding arguments to the url for a page view
• Using views to create an RSS feed
• Using fields to customize the layout of list and table views
• Overview of filters and exposed filters
• Basic Performance considerations of views

This is the script for the screencast:

Install

This screen cast is going to teach you the basics of using the views module in drupal. First we have to download the views module. To do this, go tohttp://www.drupal.org/project/views and click on download.
Once the download is complete, extract the views module.
Once the extraction is finished, move the files into the modules folder.

Configuration of the Views Module

To configure views, go to the modules page, scroll down, and make sure that all the views components are enabled. Once everything is working as it should, there should be an extra tab under site building - views.

Creating a View

Say i want to create a blog replica using views. To do this, go to views, and click add. Enter a name. Because this is going to be a page and not a block, I have to select 'provide page view' under page. Enter a url and a title as you see fit. Because I want the most recent posts to come first, I have to add a particular sort criteria - node created time, and change the default sorting to descending.

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