views 6.x-3.0-alpha2

Views 3.0-alpha2 is a mid-way release of Views 3 to enable power users to start testing out the changes we've made, allow module developers to consider the API, and generally show off some of the awesome that is coming in Views 3. We're well past the halfway point in actual features we want to add, so hopefully alpha3 will be a little less with major changes.

This release represents months of work by me, Daniel Wehner (dereine) and Mariano D'Agostino (dagmar). dereine and dagmar have ensured that for the first time, a Views release is not a one man show, but the combined efforts of a team working to make this a better package. These two community contributors cannot be thanked enough!

Major new features

• Allowing GROUP BY in queries. This allows some amount of calculation to be done, but it does not cover the full list of what views_calc can do, particularly running totals.
• Allowing an OR in the filter UI.
• New exposed features: Reset button, sorts, items per page, pager offset.
• Displays can be re-ordered in the UI.
• The UI has been re-organized somewhat. This is both an improvement and a step backward. We are going to re-evaluate much of the UI as part of alpha3.
• The following features have been made pluggable so that they can be easily swapped out. As a consequence, the UI for them has changed significantly, since plugins must be chosen separately from the settings forms for that plugin.
  • Exposed filters
  • Pagers
  • Header/Footer/Empty text
  • The query object

A warning

There is likely to be some instability with this. In particular, the GROUP BY and OR features are very new. These features cannot be made to work on some fields, but we have not yet discovered what all of these fields are. They can be marked, but not until we've determined whether they really can't be made to work or if the field can be retooled to work properly. So please be careful with these features.

Important note about CCK

You will need this patch for any CCK field to continue to work at all: http://drupal.org/node/670344
You will need this patch to use the GROUP BY feature with CCK fields: http://drupal.org/node/695298

Views API developers

Plugins have been retooled to require the use of option_definition(). This has two major effects:

1. Plugins that did not previously use this system (argument validate, argument default, access, cache) must be converted to the new system. Look at existing argument validate plugins to see how they are converted.
2. Settings that were not in the option_definition() would previously be saved because any setting in the form was saved. This is no longer true. If your plugin or handler needs a setting, it now must be in the option_definition() or it will not be kept.