Introduction to Drupal 7 News section and home page block with views

Introduction to Drupal 7

Session 3.2
News section and home page block
with Views

Drupalist: Kalin Chernev Course by Init Lab (http://initlab.org) 1

Agenda
• What is Views
• Common uses
• Administration overviews
• Case study – making dynamic news section
and latest news block for home page


What is Views
• The most popular Drupal module enabling
regular (and not-technical) users to make lists,
tables and other outputs of database queries
in a fun way.
• What we’re going to use Views for:
– Latest news section
– About us section with team members
– Latest news block for home page


Views common use cases
• From http://drupal.org/project/views:
– You like the default front page view, but you find you want to sort it
differently.
– You like the default taxonomy/term view, but you find you want to sort it
differently; for example, alphabetically.
– You use /tracker, but you want to restrict it to posts of a certain type.
– You like the idea of the 'article' module, but it doesn't display articles the way
you like.
– You want a way to display a block with the 5 most recent posts of some
particular type.
– You want to provide 'unread forum posts'.
– You want a monthly archive similar to the typical Movable Type/Wordpress
archives that displays a link to the in the form of "Month, YYYY (X)" where X is
the number of posts that month, and displays them in a block. The links lead
to a simple list of posts for that month.
• Views can do a lot more than that, but those are some of the obvious uses
of Views.


Views administration overview
• Administration > Structure > Views
• URL: admin/structure/views


Creating latest news section
• Prerequisites for making it happen:
– Specific content type which will populate the
section, i.e. news content type have to available
– News content type will have at least these 3 fields
• News image – for the news thumbnail
• Original publish date
• Body field or any other text area field
– Views and Chaos tools modules installed 
– Already populated content would a plus


Creating latest news section, step 1
• Administration > Structure > Views > Add new
view
• URL: admin/structure/views/add


Working with the controls
• Adding fields, criteria, etc
– You can use the add button directly
• Rearranging fields
– Use the options arrow on the add button


Format settings explained
• Main format: table (easiest to use for
beginners)
• Title, date and body are grouped with <br/> in
the end


Fields settings explained
• We added the following fields: news image, node
title, original publish date and the body of the
node;
• The order of the fields is important;
• The news image takes the news image preset;
• The node title links to the node itself;
• The publish date is long format;
• The body field is trimmed version to 500 symbols;
• No field labels are needed for this case;


Filter and sort criteria explained
• 2 filter criteria are used for our case:
– Content: Published (Yes) which filters the content
in such a way, that only nodes that are made
available for public will be available
– Content: Type (=News) which filters the content
displayed to be only of type News
• 1 sorting criteria is used for our case:
– Content: Post date (desc) which makes so that the
latest content is placed on top


Page settings explained

• Path: this is the URL which the page receives
• Menu: use if you want to place the page in a menu item, i.e. in the main menu
• Access: rarely used, if you want to directly place some permissions on the section
• Header: used to place text/view before the result view
• Footer: used to place text/view after the result view
• Pager: self-explanatory – used to make pagers for your views section
• More link: used in views blocks mainly


Advanced settings explained
• Contextual filters: used when
dynamic arguments are
passed from the URL for node
id or user id
• Relationships: used when you
need data from a database
table, which is not accessible
in your current state
• No results behavior: place
text/view for cases when your
query does not give results
• Exposed form: used when
your filter criteria are exposed
• Other
– Machine name: important
when you have many views
– Query settings: removing
duplicates happen from here
– Caching: when you want to
make performance tunings
– CSS class: helping themers
– Theme: advanced theming


What would an advanced user do
• Name your view better: for example ‘News
views page’ instead of just ‘Page’
• Give a better machine readable name, for
example ‘news_views_page’ instead of ‘page‘
• You can also tweak the table fields a bit, this is
optional
• To become and advanced user: play with the
views settings as much as you can;


Your dynamic news section is ready


Compile your work so far
• Go to admin/structure/features/create
• Set a name, description and a version
• Select your view and image style news


Adding a second view block
• We want to add another view, which will be a
block, again showing the latest news items
with a title and some text, no image or date
• The block will be used for the front page
• We can reuse some logic from our first view
• We’ll learn how to override views
configurations


Latest news views block
• Go back to your view:
admin/structure/views/view/{your_view}/edit
• Click “Add” and include a new views Block
• The blocks automatically takes most of your views page
configurations
• Override the following:
– The display name of the view
– Remove the fields you don’t need
– Limit the number of items to display to 5
– Change the machine readable name
– Give a block name in the block settings


Important: overriding values
• Click on the a field where the override will be
• Select the override from the drop-down


Deleting fields from views
• You can either click on the field itself and
delete it (after overriding it)
• Or you can use the Arrange option


Tweaking the latest news block view


Your home page news block is ready


Your features is overriden
• We made changes on our News view, and the
Features modules sees the changes
• Therefore, if we work with a repository, the
repository has be updated with our latest
changes version (adding the views block)


Recreate the feature and save it
• Change the version to be up in some way


Time for questions


Contacts
Kalin Chernev
– E: kalata@shtrak.eu
– T: twitter.com/kalinchernev
– U: http://shtrak.eu/kalata


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