Expanding the capabilities of Drupal Views: cool extra modules

One of the best things that ever happened to Drupal site building is the creation of the Views module. You will hardly find a Drupal website that is not using this powerful tool to list content in desired ways.

Drupal 7 Views used to be the most popular contributed module of all, but Views in Drupal 8 finally became part of the core and needs no installation. The Drupal Views module’s capabilities look unlimited — still, there are lots of extra modules that expand them even further. Let’s give them a little review today.

The Drupal Views module: key features

The main job of the Drupal Views is to create content listings, but how does it work? The Drupal Views module, together with the accompanying Views UI module, enables you to build queries to your website’s database from a pretty user-friendly interface. Based on these queries, specific data is displayed on your site. This could be anything — the latest articles on the blog, news blocks, event schedules, lists of users, and so on.

Here are at least a few of the key Drupal Views capabilities and settings that are important for mastering Drupal 8 Views:

• You can choose to show content, users, media, comments, and many other entity types, as well as restrict the display to specific content types (e.g. article) or ones that have tags.
• You can choose to show full content posts, teasers, etc., or compose your view with fields like Legos (e.g. blog title, blog cover image, publication date etc.).
• Your view can be displayed as a separate page (for which a customizable link is generated automatically) or as a block that will be part of some existing page.
• The default choices for the format are grid, HTML list, table, and unformatted list. However, there also are calendars, slideshows, RSS feeds, and so on — the more extra modules, the more options.
• With the release of Drupal 8, the core REST module package added the option of Views REST export. This allows you to share the data in the JSON format to third-party applications, which is a hot trend today.
• The filtering and sorting features enable you to present content in a specific order or filter the necessary items by some criteria.
• You can choose to enable your website users to sort or filter the results by themselves (expose the filters), which is very convenient when they need to find or choose something.
• Contextual filtering is an advanced setting that displays the data based on current dynamic context (for example, showing each current user their own content only depending on the current user ID).
• The option to add a relationship to Views enables you to pull data from other entities in addition to the one you have chosen during your view creation, which enriches the view display.

Extra modules that extend the Drupal Views

• Drupal Views Infinite Scroll

As opposed to using a pager for the results, you can choose the infinite scrolling technology, which is available through the Views Infinite Scroll module. As your readers scroll down the page, new portions of content can be uploaded automatically, or there can be a “load more” button. You can configure the number of items to be displayed, customize the button text, or expose the options to visitors so they can decide how many items to see per page. The module is ready for Drupal 7, Drupal 8, and Drupal 9.

• Drupal Views Slideshow

Your content can be presented as a slideshow thanks to the Views Slideshow module. This is not limited to images — you can make slideshows of news items, e-commerce products, customer testimonials etc. The tool is powered by the jQuery library and is highly customizable in its settings for every view. The module is ready for Drupal 7, Drupal 8, and Drupal 9.

• Drupal Views Accordion

Another module for a special display of your Views is the Views Accordion. It is powered by the jQuery library as well and presents your view as a JQuery accordion, or a vertical list of items, each of which can be collapsed and expanded. To achieve this, the module provides a style plugin for the Views. One of its advanced features is that it can work with field groupings and relationships. The module is ready for Drupal 7, 8, and 9.

• Drupal Better Exposed Filters

Here is a module to enhance the user experience with exposed filters and make advanced searches more refined. The Better Exposed Filters expands the default choice options with radio buttons and checkboxes. It is more user-friendly to have checkboxes instead of the default multiple-select box, because not all users can figure out they need to use the CTRL button in the box. It also adds the “select all/none” links and description fields. The module is ready for Drupal 7 and beta-ready for Drupal 8 and Drupal 9.

• Drupal Draggable Views

The Draggable Views module makes Views rows rearrangeable by drag-and-drop. It uses the tabledrag.js to make all Views tables draggable. The module allows you to create an admin page with drag-and-drop, set the order of the items, and implement the same order on the front-end. The module is ready for Drupal 7, 8, and 9.

• Drupal Views Bootstrap

The Views Bootstrap module significantly facilitates the use of the Bootstrap front-end framework with Drupal. It allows front-end developers to use the Bootstrap components and CSS styles directly in the Views interface, with no need to override templates or create mixins. The Views Bootstrap module is ready for D7, D8, and D9.

• Drupal Views Bulk Operations

The Views Bulk Operations (VBO) module allows you to perform bulk operations on the selected entities included in the view. For this purpose, it adds the "Node operations bulk form" field to Views. You can configure this field with the bulk operations you want to be available (e.g. “Unpublish content,” “Make content sticky,” etc. As a result, you have a checkbox next to each Views entity, a dropdown list of these actions, and an "Apply to selected items" button. The module is ready for Drupal 7, Drupal 8, and Drupal 9.

• Drupal Views Conditional

The Views Conditional module gives more flexibility to your Views by allowing you to change the display based on certain conditions. For example, if a specific field value is equal to or greater than some other value, the Views output will be different. The module is ready for Drupal 7, 8, and 9.

• Drupal Taxonomy Views Integrator

The Taxonomy Views Integrator will enable you to display the views of your choice instead of specific taxonomy terms or vocabularies. This kind of overriding gives you great customization options in how you want your taxonomy to be displayed in every case or scenario. The module is ready for Drupal 7, 8, and 9.

• Drupal FullCalendar

The FullCalendar module integrates your website with the popular open-source JavaScript Calendar Library. The module offers a display, a style, and a plugin for Views so you can show its content in a calendar. The module is ready for Drupal 7 and alpha-ready for Drupal 8 and Drupal 9.

Configure your Drupal Views according to your needs

We have listed a few contributed modules that extend the Drupal Views capabilities, but their choice is really much bigger. Just tell us what needs to be displayed on your website and how. Our Drupal experts will help you configure anything — from simple Views listings to super complicated displays.

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