OVERVIEW The views module provides a flexible method for Drupal administrators to control how lists of content are presented. Traditionally, Drupal has hard-coded most of this, particularly in how taxonomy and tracker lists are formatted. This tool is essentially a sort-of smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. It has four modes, plus a special mode, and provides an impressive amount of functionality from these modes. 1) Title List. The simplest mode is the title list. Given the parameters set in the view, the module will pull up a title list and present them to the user. 2) Table It can provide information in a table. The user can pick and choose what fields are presented, in what order they are presented, and how they are presented. An example of this format is the classic tracker, as in http://drupal.org/tracker 3) Teaser List The module can provide node teasers. This is actually just as simple as providing titles. 4) Full Nodes The module can provide lists of full nodes. I'm not sure how this would be useful, but I can imagine somebody would want it. 5) Summaries The fifth, special mode, exists only when the view expects arguments and does not get them. In this special 'summary' mode, it provides a list of what is available, with links to the more specific list. For example, many blogging sites offer archival content by month. If a view has the form of http://www.example.com/archive/YYYYMM, and the argument isn't specified, the summary would present all months available. FEATURES Views provides almost too many features in order to please the user. 1) Title The title of a view can be specified. 2) Header Each view can have an arbitrary amount of filtered text preceding it. This header can be a summary, instructions, or a description of what the user is seeing. 3) Paging Views can be set to use the pager, and each view can have its own page size. Views can also opt not to use the pager, and limit the number of records retrieved. 4) Sorting Views can be sorted by multiple fields, in either ascending or descending order. 5) Filtering Views can be filtered to published status, front page status, node type, taxonomy type and vocabulary. In the future, views can be filtered to arbitrary module fields. 6) Block or Page presentation Views can be presented either as blocks or pages; the same view can actually be used as both. Views can have menu entries. 7) Views can accept arbitrary arguments from the URL, and use these as filters. Views can accept arguments such as User IDs, Node IDs, dates and taxonomy terms. Because this module is currently in Alpha Testing, the TODO list is fairly extensive. NOTES The module is implemented using only 4.6 features for now. I'd like to keep it this way until it's ready, and then jump it to 4.7, mostly because I don't have any 4.7 systems right now, and I don't want to take the time to upgrade or create one until there's a stable release. I probably wrote this thing a little too quickly. Some parts are better than others, and it's hard for me to tell which parts are which at this point. The module is currently named 'nodequery'. I'll rename it to 'views' (or something else if a better name comes up) but I've had trouble having the Right Name come to me.