Hello again! Anyone here knows how to use Drupal Views? If so, can you explain to me some basic features that you can do with this module?

Hi vlad11,

Drupal views are like database queries. They allow you to define a tabular view of specific fields of your content types. So with views you can:

* show a list of recently added articles but displaying a teaser image for each one (something you wouldn't get out of the box from Drupal)

* if you have a directory of media eg. audio files you can display a list of audio files and sort it by play duration

Really views is a very flexible and powerful tool which can be used for simple lists or even to create a gallery of thumbnails. I suggest you grab the book "Using Drupal" from O'Reilly which explains views (among other modules) in the use of different website projects.

Hope this helps!

Thx for your reply kiai! I use sql queries to access the database so for your examples the views is not very helpul to me. A thing i find difficult however is paging the returned results. Can u do that with views?

The beauty of views is that you can do everything you would with a SQL query without writing a single line of code! And yes it does paging for you.

I know exactly where you are coming from. I'm a developer myself and my first 'itch' is to hack some code to do what I want to do. But with Drupal I feel that there has been alot of thought put into the existing major modules (CCK, Views, Panels, etc.) that everything that I would be coding would duplicate this functionality and not be as rigorously tested as these modules are.

I really suggest you take the time to learn to do things with these major modules first before you write a single line of code!

Also from a marketing perspective your website will be successful for the CONTENT you provide so you probably want to spend as much time as you can on that instead of writing code which no visitor will ever see (or apreciate).

Just my 5 cents