Defining Views

Views, as a feature, is one of the most compelling and most complex features for site builders. It is in core, which means it is out of the box with Drupal. At a high level, it is a dynamic display builder. Being able to learn and leverage its features effectively is not easy, but the results can be empowering.

Overview

Defining Views is tricky. It is important to dissect this definition significantly more.

The term display in this context has a broad definition. Drupal maintains structured content, which can be used within any display. In a traditional sense, content management systems (CMSs) store content that then gets displayed like a page on a website. Even Drupal does this with content types, nodes, and rendering nodes. However, recall earlier chapters where the problem of content duplication could be addressed by CMSs in favor of copying the same content repeatedly and pushing the burden onto content managers to do a lot of manual work. At a high level...