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Daniel Sipos
04 Feb 2013

This article looks at 10 modules that integrate with Views and that I think people should know about. From the beginning I will say that the list is not exhaustive of all the cool modules that exist out there for Views. God knows there are many more to come out...

1. Views Slideshow

Although I’m sure many of you already know Views Slideshow, I think it’s a very important module to mention. One of the reasons is that it makes your View result look so different from the old ways we were used to: tabular, lists and horizontal things like this. It creates a slideshow of your rows and the cool thing is that it integrates with other modules and plugins.

2. Views Accordion

Another interesting one if you are looking for cool ways of outputting your data. Views Accordion renders out the rows as you’d expect - in an accordion. It uses jQuery to do this and it is up for quite a bit of customization. It’s a pretty cool module so do check it out.

3. Views Horizontal Slider

We’re going horizontal with this one. Views Horizontal Slider kinda brings the idea of the accordion to a horizontal level. What I mean is that you have a little vertically full teaser of the row content and when you hover over it it expands on the horizontal to be viewed fully while the rest close up.

4. Masonry

So you know how the pins on Pinterest look like on the page don’t you? Or actually, how my website’s front page looks and behaves when you resize it? Well the latter is the effect of the Masonry jQuery plugin for which there is a Drupal module that integrates with Views. You can make your View results display in boxes of different size and automatically adjust their position depending on the screen width. Pretty neat no?

5. Views Showcase

As the name suggests, Views Showcase lets you present some content in showcases. In other words, with the help of Views and this module, you can present your nodes kinda like on this website's front page. It’s a pretty useful module if you are looking for something like this.

6. Views Infinite Scroll

Another fancy one. To fully understand what Views Infinite Scroll does, go again to my front page and scroll down. You’ll notice that the articles will keep appearing as you scroll down, without page refresh or anything. Kinda like Facebook. Now this is what can be achieved with the jQuery AutoPager plugin that is used by Views Infinite Scroll to manipulate your View.

7. FooTable

Incidentally this is my favorite solution so far to responsive tables. I once wanted to write this module to implement with Views but I didn’t have time and there was someone else already ahead with the works. The FooTable module implements the FooTable jQuery plugin and makes your View table responsive. In a very useful way I might add.

8. Views Field View

Views Field View is another cool module that although i covered more extensively in a previous post, I thought was important to include in this list. What it does is lets you embed a View as a field in another View. What’s even cooler is that it lets you pass contextual filters via tokens which makes it very powerful. So do check it out.

9. Views UI: Edit Basic Settings

This is a pretty nifty admin module that lets you place a tab on any View that lets users with the right permission change some basic View configuration without having to go into the more complicated View edit page. What can be done contextually is modify the header, footer, title, empty text, or number of items to display. Pretty helpful for sites where some less experienced users have to make some changes.

10. Draggable Views

Draggable Views makes the rows of a View rearrangeable via Drag’n’Drop. Simply put, it uses the tabledrag.js plugin to move around html table elements, and lets you nicely reposition the rows of any table generated by Views. The cool thing is that you can use this module as an ‘admin’ function to arrange the order of other Views.

Conclusion

OK, so there you have it. 10 modules out of the many out there that provide some custom functionality to the already amazing powers of Views. They are in no particular order, so don't think it means I think one is more important than the other. Feel free to experiment with them and let me know about your experiences in the comments. Also, you know Views will be in core in Drupal 8 right?

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Daniel Sipos

CEO @ Web Omelette

Danny founded WEBOMELETTE in 2012 as a passion project, mostly writing about Drupal problems he faced day to day, as well as about new technologies and things that he thought other developers would find useful. Now he now manages a team of developers and designers, delivering quality products that make businesses successful.

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Comments

Anonymous 04 Feb 2013 13:56

Thanks for putting this

Thanks for putting this together, a couple of modules there that I haven't heard of.

RdeBoer 11 Jun 2013 00:00

Maps!

Once you have a View and each of the rows (nodes) of the View contains latitude and longitude in some form (e.g. through the Location, Getlocations, Geofield or Geolocation Field modules), then you can turn that View into a map using a module like IP Geolocation Views and Maps to create maps using Google, OpenLayers or Leaflet.

el nucli 07 Feb 2014 13:57

Once again: thanks for this post!!!

Some of these modules are really incredible!!

Jotnarta 02 Jan 2017 21:21

Theming Template

Thank you for the great post. I have one question if you could you help me with; I have a view in my page, I created a teaser template but when the view is not reading the teaser, it reads the node template, Why? or how can I map it to read from the desired teaser template?

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