fromMarch 2011
Article:

Really Important Views-related Modules

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Views by itself is a powerful and highly flexible module that provides website builders with critical list making abilities. The core of Views, however, does not contain every piece of functionality that you could wish for – many Drupal developers have found reasons to expand on Views’ capabilities. Note that some of these modules have not yet been fully ported to use Views 3.x, or Drupal 7. Here are a few you should know about.

  • Views Bulk Operations: Also referred to as VBO, this module goes a long way toward helping you easily make edits like adding taxonomy tags to multiple nodes at once. It can also do things like close issues en masse, adding taxonomy terms to a group of nodes, or deleting multiple nodes at once.
  • Views Bonus Pack: One of the most critical features of this module is its ability to export fields in multiple formats, including CVS and XML.
  • Views Attach: This is sometimes confused with attached views, which are a display type in Views core. Views attach does something different; it takes information from the node or profile that it’s attached to and provides a view of related information. Attach works by using the Views plugin system to provide more display types to the base Views installation. This could be used to display a user page, and then provide a view of articles that that user has recently written.
  • Views Accordion: This module provides another display type. It uses jQuery and the first field in the view as a header. Using this allows for a display that opens and closes each result of the view, rather than rendering all of the fields for every result that a view returns.
  • Views Infinite Scroll/Views Infinite Pager: These modules provide similar functions, namely, the ability to automatically load the next page when a user reaches the end of the current page.
  • Views Slideshow: Create a slideshow of content that Views has set up for display. Images are commonly the primary content for a slideshow, but with this module just about anything can be added.
  • Views Field View: A small, but very useful module that enables you to embed a view as a field within another view. Arguments pass from the outside view to the embedded view. This can help you get things like images which are being referred to by a nodereference and bring them into the view field.
  • Editablefields: Views’ purpose is primarily to display data provided to it by other modules. This module enables you to edit a field directly from the view it is displayed in, rather than only being able to edit it from the node directly.
  • Views content cache: A more finely tuned cache than the overall Views cache, this module enables, via a plugin, a cache that pays attention to the content of individual views. Caching can be configured down to node types or in some cases, particular fields. Based on changes to that data, the cache will regenerate or can regenerate based on a pre-set lifetime.
  • Views Hacks: Another module set that provides a group of different functions. Some of these functions include a reset button for filters so all of the filters can be cleared easily and at once. It also includes an auto refresh, which forces the browser to automatically refresh – this can be particularly useful with content caching. It also contains a module that will automatically submit when an exposed filter is changed.

Views has two branches of code, 2.x, and 3.x. The 2.x line is not receiving new features, but 3.x has incorporated several modules partially or fully into the core of Views. These are Views Or, Views groupby, and Views calc. We recommend investigating those modules separately if you are using older (2.x) versions of Views.