9: Views basics

The Views module is the most used of all the contributed Drupal modules. The flexibility and generality of Views makes it difficult to describe what the module does, but in the simplest cases it is used to make lists of nodes, users, files or other content on the website. In more complex cases Views could be used to:

list titles of content related to an article
create image slideshows
display a map marking latest news pieces published on the site
show a block with a calendar containing lessons related to the course a visitor is viewing
create a page with a timeline containing all comments posted during the last 24 hours.

Technically, Views is a tool to fetch data, process data and display data, which is a quite broad field to work in.

Using Views in an efficient way is one of the most important skills a Drupal developer has to learn. It often marks the difference between a beginner and an experienced Drupalist. This chapter covers the basics of Views, but is written more like an inventory of functionality than a description of cases of how to use them. It is strongly encouraged that you look closer at a few of the implementation examples and exercises to see how to use Views in real life.