Drupal 5 Views Recipes: 94 recipes to develop custom content displays for your Drupal web site

The comments_recent default view creates a block of recent comments. We will use the standard Blocks administration page—which by now is likely familiar to you—to place the block into a page region. Yet there are some prerequisites and quirks that are worth getting to know:

The frontpage view serves two basic functions. It presents key content on the site's home page, and also enables the home page content to be syndicated with a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed.

The default frontpage view includes content marked for the front page, keeping items marked Sticky at the top. It is common to modify this default, particularly to filter for selected content types.

Give some thought to which content types you wish to include on your home page. In the MySafeWork.com screenshot, for instance, only Blog entries appear in the frontpage view, while Videos and other blocks are placed around the site's edges. Another site could set up Events and News to stream to the front page, keeping other content items, such as Forums and Slideshows, available only through the navigation menu.

The frontpage view introduces five views features. We'll highlight two (both noted with a magnifying glass) with some detail before...

The Read More link module moves the standard Read more link into the teaser body, where it is generally easier for users to notice. The module applies universally to teasers, whether content is part of a view or not, but seems especially appropriate to recommend it together with the frontpage view (Recipe 12).

Site visitors are generally curious about the content other visitors enjoy. The popular_alltime and popular_recent default views are associated with the Statistics module. Both views create a block and a tabbed page. In this recipe we look at the tabbed pages.

In this recipe, we place the statistics blocks on the page. We will explore a theming modification, and explain why the theme function is necessary. We also note an alternative to using these views-created blocks to view popular content.

The Taxonomy view is typically used to display a teaser list of all posts tagged with a specific term.

T here is a long-time odd bug in Views 5.x-1.6 taxonomy filtering, with a long-time patch available. In this recipe we will demonstrate the bug, and fix it.

Go to views/admin/build, and override the taxonomy_term default view. Don't worry that we overrode it once already. We just need to give it a new name and new URL, along with a new Title, for good measure.

Name: region_term

Title: Region Taxonomy

URL: region/term

What shall we do when the website includes generated links to taxonomy terms, but some of the terms are not yet applied? Rather than showing visitors a blank view if they click on an unused term, we will provide a more informative message. Views UI offers an Empty Text option into which you can place a text-only message, HTML, or PHP. In this recipe, we'll use a snippet of PHP with HTML. We will then create a taxonomy list to demonstrate the variable text.

The tracker default view replicates much of the functionality of the Tracker module: it tracks recent posts by users.

Interestingly, the Tracker module does not need to be enabled for the tracker view to work. In Recipe 21, we will implement both the tracker view and the tracker module, together. For now, we'll just become familiar with the default view.

The Drupal website serves as a good example of the tracker:

If you try to make each tracker field sortable, you may be disappointed with the result. If, for instance, you click on the Title column head, you will not get a nice alphabetical listing of all of the titles (even after setting each field in Views UI to be sortable).

The URL may look right: http://YOURSITE.com/tracker?sort=asc&order=Title, but the sorting is definitely wrong ("c" does not come after "j").

This is because the tracker is preset to sort by date. So, only items posted at the same time would sort alphabetically. You may modify this behavior, if you prefer.

In this recipe we'll pull back the curtain and examine the code behind the default views. We will not make any edits, we're just looking.

In this recipe we will create a module to implement a default view. At the core of this recipe is a Views hook called hook_views _default_views(). This should be a fairly accessible recipe, even if you don't consider yourself to be an accomplished coder. The module will have three files.

This chapter has covered a lot of ground. We implemented six widely-used default views that come with core Drupal, and created our own default view in code. We implemented views features including different menu types, column sorting, and arguments. We had a chance to see the source code for the default views, and make a few modifications, including a bug fix and a theme function override. Consider using your Views Worksheets from Recipe 10 to identify the features of each view. Check Appendix A for hundreds of additional default views made available by contributed modules.