94 recipes to develop custom content displays for your Drupal web site Display particular types of content in unique and compelling ways on your Drupal web site Enhance your web site with calendars, timelines, galleries, maps, podcasts, Views Fusion, and more Indispensable resources for Drupal 5 Administrators - Drupal Administration Menu, Views Bulk Operations, ModuleInfo, and Editable Fields modules More than 90 recipes - pick the ones that work best for your web site
In Detail
The Drupal View modules give you flexibility and freedom to customize the display of your web site's content. Although there are more than 100 views-enabled modules, few site administrators use Drupal Views to its full potential.
This book will enable you to realize the fullest potential of this powerful resource by providing a wide variety of powerful recipes for creating and displaying a wide variety of views - essential classics you will use again and again to innovative display methods that will make your Drupal site stand out. Pick and choose the ones you would like to prepare for your web site.
In this book you will find ninety-four recipes to create a wide selection of views. The list includes event listings, interactive calendars and timelines, maps, proximity search, podcasting, carousels, Views Fusion, and many more. You will also explore default views, views with CCK, and master a variety of ways to associate views with related content.
Most people think of Views for site visitors. But Views can also be handy for site administrators. You will get to know the Views Bulk Operations module, along with Editable Fields, and Views Custom Fields. (You'll probably wonder why you never used them before!)
If you want to take Views to the next level, the book contains a code-rich chapter on theming. However, you will find most of the recipes detailed by the author do not require any original coding at all.
As you progress through the recipes, you will be immersed in such Drupal Views topics as fields, arguments, filters, exposed filters, sorting, style plug-ins, formatters, cloning and copying views.
Because Drupal is a worldwide and ever adapting system, the author also includes great tips and resources for navigating the online Drupal community and expanding your knowledge of the recipes.
Finally, there is an extensive Appendix, which includes listings of all default views, formatters and style plug-ins for Drupal 5, along with a categorized list of patches.
What you will learn from this book? Master the Views User Interface Create views arguments Implement and create default views for recent comments, the frontpage, group listings, and more Explore a variety of ways to associate views with related content Display event listings, calendars, and timelines Make site administration easier using several administration modules Enhance your web site with Google Map tools, YouTube video bar, photo gallery, audio, and Views Fast Search Enable your users to flag and bookmark content for later viewing Incorporate views into panels and tabs Create a directory of available theme functions, and learn some key debugging strategies Use theme overrides and CSS to create more attractive views Fix the long-standing taxonomy term bug, and the body field Views display issue Create and apply patches Create some helpful browser buttons and search plug-ins to facilitate finding information online
Approach
This book will give you a long list of powerful recipes. Choose the ones that suit your needs and use them through step-by-step instructions. Most of the recipes are code-free, but a number of the recipes contain code snippets.
Who this book is written for?
This book is primarily written for Drupal site builders, administrators, and themers who want to develop custom content displays using Views. It can be used by anyone who has a Drupal 5 web site, including original site developers as well as people who have inherited a Drupal 5 site.
Some knowledge of HTML and CSS is required; PHP basics will be handy for some of the recipes.
User review
Amazing Views Documentation
One of the main reasons I was pleasantly surprised about Drupal 5 Views Recipes was the fact that the book doesn't just give a laundry list of views (or recipes), but instead helps the reader understand Views from a conceptual perspective. Personally, I much prefer a book that explains a concept as it allows me to not just execute an example that's mentioned, but transfer my knowledge to my individual requirements.
This book delivers a great overview about Views without being overwhelming and starts out with a very simple view that gets fully dissected and explained. It then moves on to explaining working with default views (which come shipped with the Views module) as a basis for a site's custom views. Views learning curve is especially steep when trying to use taxonomy terms. Drupal 5 Views Recipies describes all the GOTCHA's and ways to get around them, such as an excellent description on displaying all terms from a specific taxonomy and using Drupal's `l` function to create the related links.
Views' right hand (well, they're pretty much equal partners) is the Content Construction Kit, or CCK, which allows the definition of custom fields for content types. Drupal 5 Views Recipes explains very well how to combine the two modules effortlessly and create views such as a blogroll, using the CCK link field. Another rather complex module is CCK's Node Reference field, which requires the usage of arguments in Views. Again, the best way to conceptually understand the interaction between the two is a simple example, exactly as the one used by the author. Furhermore, the book explains how to use dates in Views. Both the Date module itself as well as large number of other module gems are explained in the book, such as setting up a calendar block, visually showing aggregated data using the Timeline module and the setup of a summary view, which can be used for things like `blog posts per month`, aggregating the number of posts in a given month.
Since working with the Views module requires dealing with a lot of different aspects of Drupal (content types, users, taxonomy, many different types of CCK fields), I was excited to get much more than just information about Views out of this book. Drupal 5 Views Recipes contains a lot of the `bread & butter` developer knowledge required for every Drupal admin, ranging from dealing with Firebug, how to work with cron and some basic understanding of the UNIX command line. Theming of views results is also mentioned in the book, although it only touches the surface. Also, this are of the book is not applicable to Drupal 6 / Views 2, as theming is the one area that radically changed in Views 2.
Overall, I can highly recommend this book to any Drupal administrator looking to begin working with Views or trying to become a Views expert. I was somewhat sceptical about the fact that this book focuses on Views 1 / Drupal 5 only. Conceptually however, there are no big differences between Views 1 and 2, so I would also recommend this book for Views 2 beginners using Drupal 6. I my view, the documentation that comes with Views is very brief and technical, and I am excited that the author succeeded in explaining the concept of Views in a structured and easy-to-comprehend way. I'll be the first to buy the second edition with an update to Views 2.
User review
Much more than Drupal 5 Views
While this book is very helpful for understanding views and the many things that can be done with them, it covers much more than just that. It provides a good understanding of Drupal for the person who is just stepping out of the novice category of Drupal users. It gives tips on customizing the administration page for easier usability, how to utilize the [,,.] website to maximize its usefulness as a source of information, and it provides a listing of useful Drupal modules. There is also a list of online resources for getting more information about Drupal.
I hesitated buying this book because it specifies that it is for version 5 of Drupal right on the cover. I finally bought it because I wanted a better understanding of views, and I have been quite happy with my purchase ever since. Yes, there are some things specific to Drupal 5, but it is generally pretty quick to figure out the differences for Drupal 6. I'm sure I will keep coming back to this book for ideas for quite awhile.
User review
Drupal 5 Views Recipes
I am not a PHP expert and I barely know how to spell CSS. My first attempt at website development began three years ago with the decision to utilize Drupal. After three years of trial and error, the searching of forums, posting questions, hiring four different developers, installation and then un-installation of almost one hundred modules, and the purchasing of several reference books and videos, I would say that I still have barely scratched the surface of potential with Drupal.
So it seems to me that there are basically six levels or stages of Drupal knowledge and understanding that users (other than true professional developers) go through:
1. The Discovery phase where the user decides `This looks easy, how hard can it be to plug in a module?`
2. The Awakening phase where the user finds that Drupal is amazingly powerful,,,, with hundreds of ways to attempt to solve the problem and to really tweak their website, they must use and understand modules and possibly the basics of CSS. This is the stage where the user may even abandon Drupal due to the feeling of being overwhelmed.
3. The Acceptance phase where the user decides they if they want to really customize their site they may need to seek professional help.
4. The Disbelief phase where the user discovers that anyone with a computer can claim to be a Drupal expert and that they (the user) may in fact know as much as the Pro they have hired. This user is not afraid to wade into the fray, comfortable in the knowledge that the site can always be restored from a backup (you DID backup the site didn't you?).
5. The Semi-Pro - Feels comfortable with about 90% of the requirements for building an awesome website, but still discovers new ideas and processes through forums and books
6. The Pro - only occasionally needs help with the finer details of a particular code snippet or module customization, generally can figure it out without assistance
With these phases in mind, I would say that `Drupal 5 Views Recipes` is a fantastic resource for stages 1 through 5. Certainly some users within the different stages will gain more from the book than will others, but overall this is a cookbook with recipes designed to not only attain a particular result,,. but also to help remove the `tunnel vision` thought process for solving Drupal problems.
This book includes almost 100 `recipes` with specific examples of how to set up the modules to attain a particular result, plus the downloadable files enable copy and paste simplicity.
Topics/Recipes include, setting up the Frontpage, podcasting, Google proximity views, Blogrolls, tweaking themes, displaying charts, Photo Galleries, YouTube, Calendars, Popular Content pages, exposed filters, applying and creating patches, setting up Cron, a thorough discussion with examples for VBO (Views Bulk Operations), Google maps, formatting of queries, Panels, code snippets to tweak the PHP files, etc.
Though written for Drupal version 5, many of the workflows and module combinations will work equally as well in version 6 (although the user interface in v6 may be different in some cases).
As I mentioned earlier,,when it comes to site development in general and specifically Drupal, I am NOT a Pro. I need instructions as well as a `Step One, Step Two, Step Three approach and that is what I really like about Marjorie's approach.
This will become a well-worn reference guide in my library of Drupal tools,,,,I highly recommend it!
