The Views module for Drupal is AWESOME

So I’ve been doing some work with Drupal in preparation for teaching a class. To really get the hang of how Drupal works as a content management system, I’m test rebuilding a public library website in Drupal. Just like I was test rebuilding the same site in Wordpress.

Some pieces of content are really easy to deal with while others aren’t. Since I’m not going to be putting News on the homepage I had to figure out how to make a page that contained all the stories. Views module to the rescue! I’ve been reading about Views for a while but hadn’t used this module much. This week I dove in and while it took me a while to build my first View, now that I’ve gotten the hang of it I’m astonished at home powerful this module is. It is very, very cool.

One of my favorite modules which is still in development status for Drupal 6 is Insert View. It allows you to use a simple syntax in your node to add a view. I used this module to insert a list of databases into a page that was mostly text and therefore a Page node. Views and CCK completely rock. I can pretty much make any content type I want and display it it different ways different places on the site. One thing I’m still trying to figure out is how to change the format of the Views output. Particularly when I am using fields, because the data doesn’t always come out in the format I want. Same thing can be said for CCK fields in nodes. There doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason for why the CCK fields come out the order they do; at least not one I’ve figure out yet.

Still learning but have made HUGE leaps forward the last week. Test site is almost done and my presentation and handout are coming together. If I could just deal with some of the pesky little issues I’m seeing with CCK Date fields…