Chapter 1. Up and Running with Views
Drupal 8 was released on November 19, 2015, after almost 5 years of development by more than 3,000 members of the Drupal community. Drupal 8 is the largest refactoring in the project's history.
One of the most important changes in Drupal 8 was the inclusion of the most popular contributed module, Views. Similar to including CCK in Drupal 7, adding Views to Drupal 8 influenced how Drupal operates, as many of the administration pages, such as the content list page, are now views that can be modified or extended by site builders.
Every site builder needs to master the Views module to really take advantage of Drupal's content structuring capabilities by giving site builders the ability to create lists of content formatted in many different ways. A single piece of content can be used for different displays, and all the content in each view is dynamically created when a visitor comes to a page. It is so important, it was the only contributed module included in the Acquia Site Builder certification examination for Drupal 7.
In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:
- Looking at the Views administration page
- Reviewing the general Views module settings
- Modifying one of the views from Drupal core to create a specialized administrative page
Note
Drupal is always changing
This book was started just after Drupal 8.0.0 was released and has been finished shortly before Drupal 8.1.0 is about to be released. In between are 8.0.1 through 8.0.5, a new release about every two weeks. With each release, a number of issues are resolved. Some of those issues affect how Views operate or the wording of some screen text or prompts. The evolution of Drupal and Views will continue long after this book is done. As a result, it is very likely that some screens and prompts described here might not match your copy of Drupal exactly. The differences are minor changes in wording to improve the understandability or clarify the meaning. Do not be alarmed if there are small differences between this book and Views when you use it. These differences will be mostly cosmetic, although it is possible a new option might appear.
