Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 9 ■ Views
Figure 9-1. Verifying that Views is installed and enabled
The Views module is the behind-the-scenes component that handles the extraction and display of
content from the database. The Views UI module, where UI stands for User Interface, is the administrator’s
interface for creating and configuring views. We’ll spend the majority of the rest of this chapter in Views UI.
Creating Your First View
With Views installed and enabled, we’re ready to proceed. But a view without content is, well, just a blank
page, so the first step is to create some content. We’ve created several articles prior to this chapter, so let’s
use those as the basis for our first foray into views. If you skipped the previous exercises or have deleted the
articles that you created, then take a moment to create several.
We are now ready to create a view that will display a list of articles. Click the Manage link at the top of
the page, the Structure link in the secondary menu, and then the Views link, which brings you to the Views
administration page. You’ll notice that there are already several views listed on this page. These are views
that are part of Drupal core and provide lists of items such as recent content, recent comments, who’s new,
who’s online, and others. You’ll recognize the output of some of these views if you stepped through
Chapter 8, as these are the views that generate the output that is displayed in several of the blocks that we
used in that chapter.
To add a View, click the “Add new view” button at the top of the page, which reveals the page for
creating a new view (see Figure 9-2). On this page, define the following:
• View name: The name must be unique (a name that has not been used for another
view on your site). It’s a good idea to pick a descriptive name that conveys the
purpose of the view so that others looking at the list can easily identify the right one
to use. For the first view, use Recent Articles as the name.
• Description: This is another field that you can use to provide additional information
about the view. Check the box next to Description and enter “A list of recent articles
published on the site.”
• View Settings: This group of fields defines what type of content is going to be
rendered by the view. If you click the Show list, you’ll see various options such as
Content, Log Entries, Files, Comments, Content Revisions, Taxonomy Terms, and
Users. The focus of our view is on Article content, so select Content. In the “of type”
field, select Article, the name of our content type. The “tagged with” field provides
the ability to limit the results of our view to only articles that contain those terms.
We’ll skip the “tagged with” field and move to the “sorted by” option. Choose
Unsorted (I’ll cover sorting later in this example).
100