views

I've recently had cause to make Views make joins to tables in peculiar ways. Here's some notes on the peculiar things I did with the views_join class to accomplish that.

First of all I'll briefly recap how we define a table to Views. Each item in the $data array returned to hook_view_data() represents all the information about a table. Each key in the array is a field on that table (well, or pseudofield), except for the 'table' key which has the basic data about our table, like this:

I happened across a wee bug in Views 2 today. I think I've noticed it before, and I'd be a monkey's uncle if it isn't already in the queue, but this is a synopsis:

If you expose the Node Type filter in Views 2 and set it to "Optional", but also with "Limit list to selected items" checked, you might expect it to continue to restrict the results to the selected items it refers to, right? (Well I did.) It does not. If your use selects the "< Any >" option from the resulting UI they will get *everything*

Doh!!

This is a quick Drupal 6.x, Views 2.x blog tutorial about creating the classic DMOZ-style sub-categories plus node listings above/below. Something Drupal does not do out of the box, but is fairly easily achieved.

(Thanks to longwave in #drupaluk on IRC for suggesting this approach.)

Who remembers good ol' Views 1.x in Drupal 5.x? Lovely, wasn't it? With that theming wizard. Giving you all the phptemplate functions you needed for fine-grained theming, ready to paste in to template.php in your theme and fiddle with until everything looks perfect.

I found an interesting "gotcha" the other day. I created a View with the Views module, exported it to code and was in the process of trying to make it appear on my website. Something it was resolutely refusing to do. I couldn't understand it. Clearly there was the View in my code. I'd cleared caches, run the update, uninstalled and reinstalled my module, even restarted Apache. Nothing!

Then I noticed this line:

The other day I decided to use the "Terms in XXXXX" taxonomy filter type in Views 5.x-1.6 and I noticed a little bit of a problem. In my list of taxonomy terms, the first/lightest term was missing so I couldn't select it. This was the same when the filter was exposed. Since I was using it on WhatTalent.com to allow people to select a community to view media from, it was a real problem!