Web developers code many functions and features into a web site to create a smooth flowing user experience. Among the most critical are queries, which present content to the user.
Queries might be used in a product catalog, a collection of images, a site map, search function or many other common web site features. Coding each query alone requires significant time, even for simple adjustments. This can dramatically increase the time and cost of making changes. However, Drupal offers tools which make the arduous task much easier: views.
In a Drupal website, views customize the presentation of relevant content to the user and provide the developer with the flexibility to handle content in a variety of ways. In other words, Drupal uses views to create custom ways to display content. Views can give pages menu entries or present them as menu tabs instead. This increased flexibility is one of the main advantages of using views.
More importantly, however, views bundle a number of functions together, enabling their use without independent coding. This contributes to the ease of maintaining your Drupal web site. For example, views allow you to rework the manner in which a query retrieves and presents content without recoding. Other advantages to using views include: no need to learn or code in PHP; views can clean the data they retrieve to ensure safety; and you benefit from the work of the Drupal user community. In short, Drupal views make coding and maintaining your web site easier and less costly than custom code.
