Module Development

Introduction to Coding for Views for Drupal 7

This page is archived

We're keeping this page up as a courtesy to folks who may need to refer to old instructions. We don't plan to update this page.

Sprout Video

There's a reason views is the most popular module on drupal.org and it's pointy-clickly user interface is only a part of that. In this series we cover the ins and outs of writing modules that implement the Views API. Once you’ve realized the power of creating complex lists of nodes, users and other content via the views UI the next logical desire is to allow people to do that with the content provided by your custom module as well. This series will take an in-depth look at exposing your own database tables to the Views module so that users can use them as a place to pull content from including the fields themselves and meta-data about how they can be used to create relationships to other content on your site.

After getting the basics out of the way we’ll also take a look at writing our own custom field handlers to expose our module’s data to views so that it can be sorted, filtered, and queried in new ways. We’ll also look at implementing views plugins to do things like add custom access control options to views and to add new output styles.

Once you understand a bit more about how views works under the hood and how easy it is to tie in to that system you’ll be reimaging your solutions for all sorts of different problems.