A view is a listing of content on a website. The Views module handles the display of views, and the Views UI module allows you to create and edit them in the administrative interface. When you define views, you are taking data from your website and displaying it to the user.
Example tasks
You can create views to output practically any content entity that is stored in the system. For example, you can create the following lists using various display output for a farmers' market site:
- Vendors as a table
- Recipes in a grid
- The most recent content on the site as a bulleted list
Confidence
Currently, Drupalize.Me offers tutorials on Views as a contributed module to Drupal 7. In Drupal 8, Views is part of core. While there are some new features, the Views UI hasn't changed very much, so most tutorials on Views will still be relevant to a Drupal 8 site builder. See also the external resources section below for Drupal 8-specific resources for Views.
For themers and site builders, one key difference is how theme information is accessed and how to override template files. Consult our Drupal 8 theming guide for how to set up your local environment for theme development and how to override template files.
For module developers, our Coding for Views series of tutorials applies to Drupal 7. Views plugins in Drupal 8 use Drupal's plugin system. Learn what plugins are in our Drupal 8 Module Development Guide and see the External resources section, below, for resources about coding views plugins for a Drupal 8 project.
Drupalize.Me resources
We are still filling out our Drupal 8 library and this page will be updated with new tutorials as they are created. Note that almost all tutorials for Drupal 7 also apply directly to Drupal 8. Those that do not apply to Drupal 8 are noted in the list below.
These tutorials in the Markup in Drupal series go into more detail about controlling markup output in Views:
- Introduction to Markup in Views
- Views Unformatted List Format
- Views HTML List Format
- Views Table Format
- Views Default Field Wrapper Markup
- Views Advanced Field Wrapper Markup
- Views Theme Information (Drupal 7 only)
- Theme Developer Module (Drupal 7 only)
- Views Template Files (Drupal 7 only)
- How to Add a Class to a View
- Recap and Challenge: Markup in Views
External resources
- Views module (drupal.org)
- Official documentation for the Drupal 8 core Views module.
- Views API overview (api.drupal.org)
- Overview of the Views module API.
- Drupal 8 User Guide, Chapter 9: Creating Listings with Views (drupal.org)
- Learn about concepts related to Views including uses for views, the parts of a view and how to accomplish tasks such as creating a content list, duplicating a view, and adding a block display to a view.
- Building Views Query Plugins for Drupal 8, Part 1 (lullabot.com)
- Learn how to use a Views Query Plugin to use data from an external API in Drupal.
- Building Views Query Plugins for Drupal 8, Part 2 (lullabot.com)
- Learn how to build field plugins, filter plugins, and relationship plugins to expose custom data to the Views module