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Views 2 RC release notes working post

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This is a wiki to try and get the community to help me out with the Views 2 RC announcement, which should be coming within days. Maybe hours. But probably days. This is cross-posted to Usability as suggested in #drupal IRC, as there are apparently folks that might help there.

This announcement will be d.o front page, so it needs to be a good one. One of the things I'm looking for here is a bullet point list of the new features in Views 2, something that I find very difficult to do, because my mind tends to freeze up when I need to make lists; especially since I've been working on so much stuff it all tends to clutter up in my head when I have to start from 0 like this.

Some points that need to be covered:

This rewrite of the original post attempts to break down the new features into different types of users that will benefit most from the improvements. It definitely needs fleshing out, particularly on the themers and developers section -- it would also benefit from screenshots (which I'll be glad to take, if needed). So, this needs additional work, but it's a start. ~billfitzgerald

FYI this is a marketing doc. Taking out marketing language and replacing it with developer-centric language is not valuable. ~Merlin

START OF ANNOUNCEMENT

Views 2, CCK 2, and Organic Groups Release Candidates now available for Drupal 6!

We are excited to announce that three key modules, Views, CCK, and Organic Groups, are publishing release candidates for Drupal 6. If you are interested in speeding the transition to a full release, install and test the Release Candidates (RC)

Views 2

The Views module has undergone extensive development, refactoring, and testing. Views2 improves the existing functionality of the Views module, and adds new features designed to simplify life for developers, site admins, themers, and end users alike.

New Features for end users

  • Multiple blocks, pages, and feeds per view.
  • Built-in AJAX for pagers, exposed filters, and argument drilldown clicks. Great in blocks!
  • RSS feeds for comments.
  • Greater control over exposed filters, including being able to reduce a taxonomy list to just terms you select
  • Can have multiple "displays" on a view with the same path, which have different features -- give your administrators and privileged users richer views than others!

New Features for themers

  • generates the theming information needed to customize your views through templates
  • all views output is done through templates, dramatically improving theme; the old theme wizard is no longer necessary.
  • do we want to link to the theming documentation page here?

New Features for site admins

  • A completely reworked UI for creating and maintaining views. Features of the UI include:
    • Options are presented based on context; thus, when editing/creating a view, you are presented with only the options you need.
    • If 2 people are editing the same View the view will be locked; only one person can edit a view at a time.
    • Live preview! Make a change, scroll down and see what your view looks like.
    • Upon previewing, performance timers show how long your View took to build, query, and render. Great for quick performance tuning.
  • Views can pull data from many different core tables. Users, comments, statistics, files, plus other things can be plugged.
  • Can have views within views, known as attachments.
  • "View type" is now called 'style' and has split into style and row style; these are far more flexible. We've also added useful styles such as grouping and grid.
  • Lots inline help with the Advanced Help module.
  • New relationships can let you have all the fields from referenced nodes right in your view.
  • New glossary styles make it easy to have the 'alpha pagers'
  • Pluggable mechanism to find values for arguments for blocks -- easily create views for the node or user page with no PHP snippets required
  • Views now have optional tags in addition to names; allowing you to sort your list of views and find and edit the ones for which you're looking.
  • Export multiple Views at once.

New Features for developers

  • Reworked, pluggable object-oriented API. Every component of Views is implemented as plugin objects and handlers. Views developers now have a great deal of freedom extending and customizing Views with their own data tables, display types, and view and row style plugins.
  • Tool to analyze your view for common mistakes (that can be expanded through plugins)
  • Pluggable argument validation (can embed PHP code) to give you greater control over what kind of arguments your views can use
  • The SQL statements used to generate a view are displayed on preview
  • do we want to link to the Views2 documentation page here? (probably not, primary Views2 doc will now live in advanced help bundled with the module. -- Merlin)

Technical details, and known bugs

  1. There are a couple of bugs in Drupal 6.2 that are fixed in Drupal 6.x-dev that make it very important that Drupal 6.3 is used (or, since that is not currently available, Drupal 6.x-dev).
  2. If you find yourself having troubles with the javascript (there are a few people who report problems that we can't figure out yet) the javascript part can be completely turned off and the UI largely works without javascript, though a couple of places (arguments, in particular) may be a little rough.
  3. The upgrade path from 1 to 2 is going to take some manual work to convert your Views to the new format. Views2 contains a Views1 conversion tool, but existing views will likely need some additional work to function in Views2

In using and testing the Release Candidate, if you find what appears to be a bug, browse and/or search the issue queue to see if someone else has reported a similar issue. If you have found something new, please file a new issue.

Content Construction Kit - CCK 2

CCK has been significantly reworked for Drupal 6, both to add new functionality and to integrate into the new Views 2 code.

New Features

  • New ajax 'Add more' button that the user can click as many times as they like to add the right number of values for multiple value fields.
  • The Manage Fields screen now uses drag 'n drop to make it easy to re-organize fields and fieldgroups.
  • The Manage Fields screen now lets you re-arrange non-CCK "fields", like the title and body, as well as CCK fields. A hook is available for modules that want to have their own node form elements benefit from this.
  • Numerous usability improvements have been incorporated based on feedback from the usability testing at the University of Minnesota.
  • A new API has been added to make it easier to create and populate fields from custom modules and profiles.
  • A new Content Permissions module included in the CCK package lets you control access to individual fields.
  • CCK now integrates with the Devel Generate module. Core CCK fields and any other CCK field that implements the content_generate() hook will add random valid field values to the generated nodes.
  • New formatters can format either a single field value or all the multiple values of a field. Custom modules could use this to display field values in a map or chart.

CCK / Views 2 Integration

As always, CCK has automatic, built-in Views integration for all CCK fields.

  • Add a 'relationship' to a view using a nodereference or userreference field, then add any field, sort, filter, or argument from the referenced node or user to the view (just indicate it is coming from the relationship instead of the original node).
  • Views filters now include 'empty/not empty' options.

Known Problems and Bugs

Upgrade from D5

  • Many of the older updates have been removed from the code, so you need to get current on the D5 version before upgrading to the D6 version, or you may get messages about missing updates.
  • There are still some sporadic upgrade problems.

So please be sure to make a backup copy of your database before upgrading to the D6 version.

Organic Groups

Compared to Views and CCK, Organic groups received less of an overhaul for Drupal 6. Most of the changes are straightforward improvements which take advantage of new features in core and Views. A few major highlights:

  • Member listings powered by Views. Anytime you want to list the members of group(s), you may use standard Views user listings to do so. So you can now list all members who have a given profile field or all members who are group admins and so on. All the power you are used to for making lists of group nodes and group posts now extends to users. For example, the Faces tab in each group is now powered by a View which uses the 'grid' style.
  • More Views fields such as the number of members and posts in a given group.
  • The current group (if any) is exposed to javascript code. This means you can easily target advertisements or track analytics by organic group.
  • Theming groups has become easier as we now ship a template which is for all groups by default. No need to move it to your theme directory unless you want to make further changes.
  • Developers who use Devel Generate module along with OG can now generate group nodes and group posts that have proper OG behavior.
  • Groups now have an optional 'Group files' block which lists all uploads in the group.

Known issues

  • Email notification functionality is broken. I expect to replace it with og_notifications module.
  • OG Panels is not available because panels module has not yet ported to Drupal 6.