Intro to administrative views

Objectives
  • Inspect administrative views.
Prerequisites
  • Being familiar with the Drupal administration interface.
  • Being familiar with content types and fields.
  • Being familiar with the basic views creation process.
  • Already having created at least a handful of views with a page or block display.

Introduction

Drupal comes pre-installed with a number of views, listed at Manage > Structure > Views.

You can very roughly divide these views into two categories: public-facing views, whose goal is to display information, and admin-facing views that usually help you manage entities such as content, users, or taxonomy terms.

Public-facing views

These include:

  • Frontpage (lists all content marked "promote to front page")
  • Recent comments (lists the 10 most recent comments across all content)
  • Who's new (lists the 5 newest users)
  • Who's online (lists all users who were active within the last 15 minutes)

Admin-facing views

Other views are only used as part of the administration interface, such as:

  • Content (the main Content management page)
  • People (the main User management page)
  • Comments (the main Comment management page at /admin/content/comments)

To customise Drupal's administration interface to your specific needs, you can edit all of these views, or even completely replace them with your own.

Summary

  • You can roughly divide most views into:
    • public-facing views (mostly content)
    • admin-facing views (mostly administrative)
  • You can customise all views