With Views becoming more advanced and easier to use, and with the introduction of many helper modules for theming like Semantic Views, I find myself tending to rely mainly on views for full sites. Everything is a view: Front Page, Taxonomy Pages, Search Results. I'm wondering if this breaks Drupal core functionality.
Drupal is designed to display nodes as teasers and full nodes. With views I replace this mechanism. Of course I would still use "Promote to front Page" and "Sticky" to sort the view rows, but the outcome is just fields.
The main argument is that a site of this kind cannot be easily ported to another theme, and its data are not properly presented as Drupal core intends to do.
Is it better to stick to good old Node templates and keep views away from Front and Full node pages?
Comments
I disagree that porting to
I disagree that porting to another theme is difficult, it just depend on how you code your css.
For instance, I remove all/most of
<
div> tags from the views tpl.php files and add more generic code like
<
h2> and
<
p> instead; and id's.
However, I would recommend using panels if you plan on constructing your site completely with views; using panel panes instead of blocks/page greatly increases your flexibility.
I guess it mainly depends on your approach in using views itself.
Example:
<div class="column_right_row"><div class="teaser_wide">
<div class="label">Podium</div>
<div class="date"/>
<h3>
</h3>
<a href="/opinie/podium/articledecember10951.ece/een_afscheid_van_het_eigen_waardemodel.html"/>
<p>De Zwitserse bevolking heeft zeer duidelijk vóór een bouwverbod voor minaretten gekozen.</p>
</div>
</div>
I do use panels to mash up
I do use panels to mash up blocks into full pages and create my own layout. I'm only concerned about how much does this break Drupal if you know what I mean. I go Views-Happy with every new website and I wanted to stop and discuss if that's ok :)
And you should try Semantic Views. You wont need to touch Views template files
I've tried Semantic Views,
I've tried Semantic Views, but I couldn't get it to work within a reasonable amount of time, and besides that; drupal's tpl.php files contain a lot of 'unnescesary' code (so ill be editing them anyhow)..
Well, to be more exact, they contain a lot of code which is suitable for the 'generic website'. However, when I'm building my website, I know that I won't be using attachements or block titles, or the pager; so those lines are not needed.
Concerning your question about the drupal core functionality being endangered by using views-only; what are the specific functionalities you are concerned about?