Every content management system needs its query builder—an application which creates customizable lists of content elements and present them in a similarly customisable way. Customization will be typically through an admin interface on the website, and the query builder can be as basic as a text box for SQL or as complex as a many-layered GUI across multiple webpages. Drupal, for its part, has Views. D5 has Views 1, D6 has Views 2, and it looks like the forthcoming Drupal 7 will have Views 3.
However, as the criteria for list-building get more and more complex, there will come a point where custom code will produce the exited result far more quickly and efficiently than Views. The problem for the developer is: while simple lists are obviously candidates for Views; and riotously tangled layouts are obviously candidates for your own modules and SQL; how do you cope with the middle ground? How can you tell from the outset that a particular problem will land you in a Views-only cul-de-sac?
Well, I contend that the individual developer needn't worry, so long as he's clued up about developing with, not outside, Views. I reckon that the middle ground can almost always be bridged by Views augmented with custom code; unless you're completely convinced from the start that, say, the logic of what you want is not representable in a query builder, you can start with Views and tweak with customisations later.
But to be sure you can extricate yourself from any small to medium tiger traps that "Views+your spec" might drop you in, it's wise to know in advance the full range of tools at your disposal. Here are five of what I consider the most important tricks for building a complex Drupal view.
- Views themeing Views has a very modular set of Drupal theme files. The markup and presentation of individual fields, rows of fields, and whole views of many rows can all be modified on a per-view, per-view-format or even cross-site basis. In a particular view's admin GUI, you can see an entry marked "Theme: Information." If you click on this, it will tell you what template files the view will try to use, and what files it's currently using (in bold.) You can copy these files across from the module directory to your theme and rescan to use them; you can even rename them to be specific to the current view or formatting options, and when you rescan the directories, Views should spot the new files.
- Addon modules There are a number of extension modules for views which will very quickly improve view presentation or data flexibility. At the one end is Semantic Views, which allows you to present certain fields in your views with more semantic markup: titles can be h2 elements; contact details can be in address elements, etc. At the other end of the workflow, close to the database, is the Views Or plugin, which lets you swap the normal views filter AND logic ("all items must be published AND have type=blogpost") for a more inclusive OR logic ("all items must have type=blogpost OR be less than three weeks old"). If you're not sure whether there's an addon module for you, ask on the #drupaluk IRC channel.
- Views as a backend Several third-party modules use views as an adjunct: that means that while the module itself is doing something apparently clever with your content, it's secretly using a view to manage most of the hard work. If you want to maintain arbitrary admin-sortable lists of content, Nodequeue provides a nice interface for doing so. But behind each nodequeue sits... a Drupal view, and a plugin which ties the nodequeue database table to your nodes to produce the required results. Tagadelic, a module which produces tag clouds for e.g. your recent blogposts, has over the years moved from a standalone module (which still exists), to a Views style plugin, so you can build the initial tags view yourself and activate Tagadelic styling and popular-tags filtering once you're done.
- Views hooks The workflow for views is like the workflow of Drupal itself in miniature: as such, it has its own set of views-specific hooks, including hook_views_pre_render and hook_views_pre_build. All the Views hooks are documented on drupalcontrib.org. So, learn the basic page-view flow, from a blogpost by Mr Views himself, Earl Miles. Pick it apart. See what each bit does in the code. You should eventually be able to find the views hook you want in the code, and be able to modify the view object, its compiled SQL, the results returned, and even the eventual output, all in your own modules.
- Writing your own plugins A Views plugin is less complicated than you might fear. There's not a great deal of easy-to-find, easy-to-read documentation out there about Views plugins, but try not to let that put you off. A plugin consists basically of a module, a hook function (or two) and a PHP object: the rest is just detail and theming! While that sounds a bit glib, it has some merit: look at the plugins for such modules above as Semantic Views and Nodequeue, and see how they all relate back to an object in a .inc file and a template in a .tpl.php file. You can extend an existing plugin using standard PHP class syntax, and develop it piece by piece by overriding methods one at a time. Views plugins are incredibly powerful, more so than using configurable third-party modules or just interrupting the current view using a Views hook. They get your code right into the heart of a given view's workflow and let you do (almost) whatever you want. Remember to clear caches if you get stuck: you might even need to resort to a "TRUNCATE cache" at your MySQL command line if your changes don't seem to be having an effect.
If you've started building your listing page with Views, but the spec has ended up getting more complicated, try each of the five solutions above in turn. When the problem at hand suddenly gets a whole lot more complicated, escalate your solution's complexity by moving another step down the list!
There's obviously a lot more to developing with Views than a single blogpost could ever really summarize without turning into an extended essay. But there's a lot more documentation out there—although of a pretty sprawling and hard-to-navigate sort—and the tips above should hopefully give you pointers both for where to start your extending of Views, and also what to google for when you get stuck. Have fun and good luck!
