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Views installation

  1. Install Drupal 7.
  2. Install and activate Ctools, the only prerequisite for Views
  3. Install and activate Views

Done. Finished. So easy. The following image is what you see when you first enter the Views UI page.

Views administration page showing some views supplied with Views

Ctools

Ctools is a collection of modules listed below. Views requires only the Chaos tools. Activate that one module. You can delete the rest. Hopefully one day Ctools will be split up and only the required parts will be installed.

  • Bulk Export
  • Chaos tools
  • Chaos Tools (CTools) AJAX Example
  • Chaos Tools (CTools) Plugin Example
  • Custom content panes
  • Custom rulesets
  • Page manager
  • Stylizer
  • Views content panes

Views

Switch on the Views module. You have to set two permissions and that is it. This part of views, the Views module, has no user interface and is there purely to service other modules. There is a separate Views UI module for creating Views by hand.

The two permissions are listed next. You restrict administration to trained staff who have a need to create lists. I have not found a reason to let people bypass access controls.

  • Administer views
  • Bypass views access control

Views does not have configuration settings. The only configuration is in Views UI.

Views UI

You have to switch on the Views UI module to write views by hand and you have to write views by hand to learn how Views works. After you learn how Views works, you can create views in modules and by other means.

Views UI has no permissions because it uses the permissions of Views.

The configuration page for Views UI has two tabs, Basic. and Advanced. The Basic defaults work. Switch on the following options when you reach the level where a view works and you want to tune the view for performance.

  • Show the SQL query
  • Show performance statistics

Switch off Show advanced help warning when the warning message starts to annoy you. The advanced help is not as good as the online tutorials and references.

Save your changes then switch to the Advanced settings. Switch on Disable views data caching for testing a new view then switch the option off to reduce overheads for normal operation.

If you are using the optional Devel module for performance tuning, switch on Enable views performance statistics via the Devel module.

Get a view working. If you translate anything to any other language, switch on Views translations for your views. translation is the same as the cache, switch it off if you have trouble developing a view then switch it back on when the view is working.