Introduction
The Views module is the most popular contributed module in the Drupal ecosystem, and with good reason, as it has become one of the cornerstones of Drupal development. Along with other modules, such as CCK and Panels, it has contributed immensely towards Drupal's reputation of being an ideal tool for rapid site development and deployment.
Views, at its most fundamental level is a database query builder. It allows us to construct database queries using a user-friendly interface and, subsequently, presents the result to the user in a variety of manners. The query builder supports a number of components including:
Arguments which are usually dynamic parameters passed to the query at runtime, such as the elements of the URL of the page being displayed.
Filters which conditionally refine the query to return a more accurate result set. For example, since we will customarily only require nodes which have been published, we can add a filter to the view stating that the result set should...
