Sometimes when you buy property they construct a big building in front of your view and the value of your investment decreases. Othertimes, they demolish a big obstacle and you are left with a million-dollar view that pays a huge return on your initial investment. This is what has happened with Drupal. Those of us who invested time and effort in learning Drupal in the past are now being richly rewarded as the community delivers more and more powerful functionality.
Case in point: the Views Module pioneered by merlinofchaos was recently upgraded to include a Views Theme Wizard. This is a genius bit of programming that implodes a big obstacle for Drupal site builders. From the instructions that come up when you click the Theme Wizard tab in the Views admin interface:
The views theming wizard generates code that you can use in your phptemplate theme to help you customize the output of a view. Simply select a theme and it will generate code for your template.php as well as template files for the individual views.
At this time this code assumes your view is a list type view! It may not generate effective code for other types of views. Future versions of this program will be smarter, and give more options, but this wizard is still a huge start.
This works for every view, so even if you have cloned 100 views from the same parameters, they can all have a different look and feel based on easy edits to the view's Theme, which is generated by the wizard. It might look a little scary at first, but just play around with it on a test site. Make changes and watch the effect. You will get it, and when you do, working with Drupal will never be the same.
Still on Drupal 7? Security support for Drupal 7 ended on 5 January 2025. Please visit our Drupal 7 End of Life resources page to review all of your options.
