Introduction to Views 3 in Drupal 7

Introduction

Views is one of the most popular Drupal modules with over 5 million downloads and over 700 thousand sites that report using it. It is so popular that Drupal 8 will ship with Views in core as part of an exciting and welcomed initiative of the Drupal 8 release process.

This is an introductory tutorial to the world of Views and how you can use this great module to create listings of content. There are a few smaller topics that I will cover as part of this tutorial. First, we’ll see how to get started and create a View. Then we will see what kind of listings and content formats are available for us out of the box.

Once we choose how the View will look like, we will cover a bit of filtering and sorting. These options are used to make sure we display only the right content and in the order we want it to appear. Sounds exciting?

Let’s dive right in.

Getting started

Installing Views is like installing any other module. I’m not going to cover the process of installing Drupal modules but rather point you to the definitive guide on Drupal.org.

If you know how to use Drush (which I recommend wholeheartedly to learn), you can run two simple commands and you’re good to go:

drush dl views
drush en views views_ui -y

This will download and enable all the necessary modules (including CTools which is a dependency).

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