Taming Cerberus: Advanced Views Theming Using Templates, CSS, and Drupal's UI

The Views module, a complex and beautiful query builder, is at the heart of any customized Drupal installation. Views exposes much of its functionality to the site-builder through the Drupal UI, but its true potential and flexibility is uncovered using Views template files, which have a modular have a field-level specificity.

Most site-builders can add a views field and perhaps modify the output somewhat. But what about those times when you've got a really great-looking PDF from a designer and you just can't figure out how to make Views obey?

My friends, when that happens, you are caught in Drupal Hell. You must escape past the three-headed guard-dog, Cerberus, whose heads are Templates, CSS, and the Drupal UI. Only then can you bribe Charon to take you over the Styx.

Our primary example will be the construction of a Views-based slider that rotates through Views fields. Through this lens and the lens of several other common tasks, we will move from the construction of this View in the Drupal UI, moving into templating and other advanced Views techniques, and we will end with using hook_alter for tasks like Views SQL rewrites. We will take a practical, problems-based approach.