Creating a custom Views style plugin

Views style plugins such as tables and lists are used to render the view in a variety of display formats. The inbuilt plugins are often all that are needed for basic displays and the ability to override their template files via the theme tends to be a straightforward answer for most customization requirements. However, more complex display scenarios, especially those which are frequently reused, necessitate a better solution—a custom style plugin.

In this recipe, we will create a custom style plugin which will render a view as an HTML definition list and use it to display a list of taxonomy terms along with their descriptions.

Getting ready

Create a view named definitions to display taxonomy terms which displays two fields—the taxonomy term and its description—and optionally also takes the vocabulary ID as an argument as in the following screenshot.

As in the previous image, a Page display also needs to be created and made accessible at the URL definitions...