Views

Views is one of the more complex modules within Drupal but it is pretty indispensable even for the most basic of sites. Views requires a second mopdule (Ctools) to be installed and we can look on the project pages for both these modules at http://www.drupal.org and find and copy the location for the latest versions for Drupal 7. In this case we need to install both modules before we can activate ctools, views, and the views UI from the modules administration page.

http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/ctools-7.x-1.2.tar.gz
 

http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/views-7.x-3.5.tar.gz
 

You may have to enable the modules a couple of times until you have both the Views and the Views UI modules enabled as shown below.

Installing Views may disable some modules that you have already enabled. This seems to be a bug and illustrates some of the problems of working with modules that are built by different people. In this case the modules are used a lot in the community and so the damage is not great but you may find you need to enable the overlay, menu, book, blog, and toolbar modules. You can get to the modules page from http://drupalsite/admin if you need to once you have logged in as the site administrator.

The example below will create a view showing just content type offices sorted in the sequence that they were entered with the newest first. We are asking the view to create a page which will show up to 10 offices on a page and we are creating a menu link on the main menu so we can access the page easily. The page will use the teaser formatting of the content type and can also be access directly with http://drupalsite/offices.

Here is the view displayed on our website.

You can go back and edit the view to change the sort order to the title by editing the view and adding the Content:Title to the sort order criteria before rearranging the fields so the view sorts on the Title. It is a little confusing here because you can see all fields even though only the Office content type has been selected for the field.

LAB: Create a View on Article

Create a View on articles and add to the main menu.