With filters, we can define query conditions and refine the results of a view. But what is a filter and how do filters work in Views? In this tutorial, you'll learn:
- How to add and configure filter criteria to a view to refine results
- What configuration options are available for filter criteria operators
- How filter groups allow you to group and order filter criteria to achieve desired results
By the end of this lesson, you should understand how to use and configure filter criteria in Views to refine the results of your view. (Note: We'll cover exposed filters in Overview: Exposed Filter Criteria in Views)
In order to display values for referenced entities in views, you need to add a relationship. What is a relationship, how do they work, and what does it mean to require this relationship? What are some common use cases for adding a relationship to a view? By the end of this tutorial you should be able to:
- Explain some common use cases for adding a relationship to a view.
- Understand the concept of entity references and how those field values can be displayed in a view.
With sort criteria, we can specify how to order our list. We can specify sort criteria using any field on or related to our view's base entity, and then specify in which order to sort, e.g. ascending or descending. If you are familiar with MySQL, it may be helpful to know that sort criteria are the ORDER BY clause of the query that Views builds. In this tutorial, you'll learn:
- How to add and configure sort criteria to a view to sort the list in various ways
- What configuration options are available
By the end of this lesson, you should understand how to use and configure sort criteria in Views. (Note: We'll cover exposed sort criteria in Overview: Exposed Sort Criteria in Views)
Like most output in Drupal, Views relies on Twig templates for a significant amount of its rendering. In this tutorial we'll identify where you can find the default Views templates within your file system, what the common templates are for, and how to name your templates so that they are applied to specific views.
By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to:
- Identify where to find default views templates
- Understand which templates apply to what part of a view
- Get a sense of the template suggestions and how to use them to limit where your custom templates are applied
- Identify a view's machine name
- Identify a display's machine name
- Identify a field's machine name
Now that you understand the purpose of relationships in Views, let's add a relationship to a view so that we can access and display a field value from a related entity.
In this tutorial, we'll modify the Player Awards view to add a relationship to the player that received the award. Then we will add a field that belongs to the player content that would normally not be available to the view without our new relationship.
Now that we understand what templates are and how we can use them, let's override some templates! In this tutorial we'll copy the views wrapper template to our theme and override it so that we can customize the markup for the Baseball Players view. Then we'll modify the template so that our view's pager appears both above and below our table of players.
To follow along with our Drupal Views tutorials, set up a Drupal site loaded with our 4 custom views and baseball stats content that will make querying in Views a bit more interesting and meaningful.
By the end of this tutorial, you should choose a solution and follow the instructions for creating a Drupal site loaded with our starting point content and views.
Drupal core is built with performance and scalability in mind. It is Fast by Default. But performance is often a by-product of your specific application, and depending on how you're using Drupal, you can further optimize your site using contributed modules. These modules range from debugging utilities to cache-related modules.
It's worthwhile to have a general idea of what's available in the contributed module space. And, when you need to address your site's unique performance needs, it helps if you already know about existing solutions.
In this tutorial we'll:
- Look at a few popular contributed modules that improve Drupal's performance
- Learn about the benefits these modules may provide to your site
- Provide tips on how to configure these modules
By the end of this tutorial you should be able to list some popular performance related Drupal modules and describe their use case.
The performance optimization settings and modules provided by Drupal core are intended to work for the broadest possible set of use cases. From an administrator's perspective they provide minimal configuration options, and are designed to just work by being enabled. But behind that simplicity are some powerful features that will help speed up any Drupal-powered application.
The core Dynamic Page Cache and Internal Page Cache modules are designed to provide a base cache setup for any site. These modules are responsible for the static page cache, dynamic page cache, and lazy loading optimizations.
For developers, Drupal provides a complete and well-designed Cache API. You can, and should, integrate it into your custom code. This integration includes defining the cacheability of any content your module outputs so that Drupal can be smart about how that affects how and when a page that incorporates the output can be cached -- as well as storing and retrieving the results of complex or long-running operations. The API also helps with setting appropriate HTTP headers for the responses Drupal generates for each request so that the user's browser and other layers in the stack can appropriately cache the output.
The entire system is flexible, and there are many contributed modules that can aid in making the default caching system even faster for specific use cases.
In this tutorial, we'll:
- Learn about the caching-related modules in Drupal core
- Review the Drupal core performance settings and recommended values
By the end of this tutorial you should be familiar with the Drupal core modules responsible for caching, their settings, and recommended values.
There's no magical set of right tools to use to monitor a Drupal site's performance and health. While thinking about performance monitoring, you need to optimize your approach depending on the number of applications you manage, their complexity, business needs, and the skill-set of your team. Based on these factors, you may choose to use one of the core or contributed modules, go with third-party solutions and services, or some combination of both.
Drupal core comes with a couple of modules that allow you to monitor the health and performance of the site including Syslog, Database Logging, and the status reports provided by the System module. There are also numerous community-contributed modules, a sampling of which we'll cover here.
In this tutorial, we'll:
- List some contributed modules that are commonly used for monitoring a Drupal site
- Provide an overview of what each module does
By the end of this tutorial you should be able to list a few contributed modules that might be useful for monitoring your Drupal application and define what each one does.
No one likes to wait for a slow site to load. Not me, not you, and definitely not search engines. And the effect of site load times on things like SEO, user bounce rates, purchase intent, and overall satisfaction are only going to become more pronounced over time.
Drupal is a modern web framework that is capable of serving millions of users. But every site is unique, and while Drupal tries hard to be fast out of the box, you'll need to develop a performance profile, caching strategy, and scaling plan that are specific to your use case in order to be truly blazing fast.
Drupal site performance depends on multiple components, from hardware setup and caching system configuration to contributed modules, front-end page weight, and CDNs. Experienced Drupal developers looking to optimize their applications know where to start looking for potential savings. They can manipulate settings and combinations of these components to achieve the desired results. Our goal with this set of tutorials is to help explain the process and provide you with the insight that comes with experience.
In this tutorial we'll:
- Introduce high-level performance concepts for Drupal that we'll then cover in more detail elsewhere
- Provide an overview of the main Drupal performance components.
By the end of this tutorial, you should understand what components around your Drupal application are responsible for site performance.
We have half of our editorial process in place. Existing editorial groups can now edit content they are responsible for, and only that content. However, to enable editors to effectively manage the flow of articles coming in, we need something else: an editorial workflow system that allows them to easily determine when an article is ready for review, and to either send it back to the reporter when it needs more work, or to publish it on the site when it’s good to go.
Out of the box, Drupal allows a piece of content to be either published or unpublished. When the “published” checkbox is unchecked on the node editing form, only users with the “administer nodes” permission are allowed to view the content. That’s enough for some sites, but it doesn’t give our reporters and editors as much control as they need. For example, there’s no way for a reporter to mark an article as an in-progress draft and come back to it later. In addition, there’s no easy way for an editor to tell a reporter that an article needs more work—the editor must contact the author manually.
In this lesson, we'll get an overview of how the Workbench Moderation module can do this for us. We'll look at Workbench states and transitions, and how we use these to moderate our content.
Additional resources
The final step to complete our site for Our Media is to get the editorial workflow in place. In this lesson, we'll add moderation to the Article content type, create the correct States and Transitions we need, and then finish up by setting permissions so it all works the way we expect.
Additional resources
We now have our new editorial system in place and the Our Media site is ready to go. We’ve met the needs of our client, but there are some other modules that are also worth checking out:
We have more detailed instruction in another video on using the Views Bulk Operations (VBO) module.
Additional resources
Congratulations! The Our Media website now includes all the major features that the staff wanted. We’ve used the Workflow Access module to create a distributed system for content management, preventing collisions when editors review content they are responsible for. We’ve also provided the team with an editorial workflow, which makes it easy for them to track changes to content as it moves through the editorial process. On top of that, all of this is done in a consistent, easy-to-use interface, so editors quickly find the content they need. In this summary, we'll take a tour of the completed Our Media site, discuss our implementation points, and review the modules we used and discussed throughout the series.
Additional resources
Stylizer enables site editors to change the styles of panel pane backgrounds, content, text styles, borders, and heading styles. It provides an extensive settings form, including a live preview and integration with the Color module, for point-and-click color picking.
In this lesson, we will:
- Identify style options provided by Panels
- Enable Stylizer module
- Change Styles of a Panel Pane and Heading using Stylizer
By the end of this lesson you should have a good idea of whether or not you want to enable Stylizer on your Panels-based site and if you do, how to access and use it.
Stylizer module comes packaged with CTools.
Demo site log in:
- Navigate to /user
- Login with admin/admin
Additional resources
Views Content Panes is a module that comes packaged with Panels. It provides a new type of Views display called a Content Pane that enables you to pass off Views configuration to the Panel Pane.
In this lesson, we will:
- Enable Views Content Panes module
- Build a View using Content Pane display
- Explore Pane Configuration in Views
By the end of this lesson, you will have a better idea of why you will want to use content panes in Views whenever you are placing Views in Panels.
Demo site log in:
- Navigate to /user
- Login with admin/admin
Additional resources
In a Views Content Pane display, it's possible to use exposed or contextual filters as panel pane configuration. We'll walk through this process and why you might want to utilize this feature of content panes.
In this lesson...
- Add an exposed filter to a view
- Use the exposed filter as panel pane configuration
- Place the same view twice with different configuration
Demo site log in:
- Navigate to /user
- Login with admin/admin
Additional resources
We'll use Page Manager, Panels, and Views to create a customized user account page that features articles authored by the user whose account is being viewed.
In this lesson...
- Build a view of articles with a contextual filter
- Create a customized user account page
By the end of this lesson, you'll walk away with ideas for how to create your own customized user account page.
Demo site log in:
- Navigate to /user
- Login with admin/admin
Additional resources
The default taxonomy term page provided by Drupal leaves much to be desired. If a taxonomy vocabulary has multiple levels, but content is only tagged with only the child term and not the parent, parent term pages are left with no content listed on them, despite the fact that there is content tagged with terms below it.
In this lesson...
- Create a taxonomy vocabulary with two levels of hierarchy
- Enable the Taxonomy Term Template
- Build a custom term page for each level of hierarchy
By the end of this lesson, you'll know how to create better taxonomy term pages using Views, contextual filters, and Panels.
Demo site log in:
- Navigate to /user
- Login with admin/admin