Dear Drupal Community,
My question has to do with creating fully customized views in Drupal.
A tiny bit about my background...
I've been developing sites for some time now using Joomla along with the Seblod CCK. This has allowed me to push Joomla to new limits. My problem is, Seblod is "added on top" of the Joomla core, and that creates some coding messes. Also, Seblod does not have native support for Ajax and full URL control.
I've also been developing sites using PHP frameworks (Yii and CodeIgniter). These are really nice, but I find I often have to repeat very basic set-up steps over and over again for each project.
The sites I build always need custom fields, so Drupal's "Field" module seems perfect! I like that "Fields" is integrated into Drupal core. And I like what I have read about how solid Drupal is for scaling sites up.
Generally, I do NOT like "themes" and "templates." As much as possible, I like to just start with a clean canvas and build my layouts with PHP, CSS, and JS. With Seblod, I am able to do this, making calls to the Seblod fields in my templates. I am also able to do this using PHP frameworks.