Patrick:
Just in time for the holidays is an Open Atrium security and maintenance release! With security updates for views, a massive performance update for strongarm (page load times cut in half in some cases), and bug fixes in the Atrium features. Making Open Atrium faster, stronger, and more secure.
Erik:
Two new modules Field Boxes and Views Boxes expand the way boxes can really help a site to be flexible.
Chris:
When the size of your views becomes problematic or if you want to offer some customizations to your administrators without exposing them to the views UI, you can use context to add some additional configuration options.
Brad :
Many sites have views that are used to generate a large number of sections/pages on the site, and you may want to easily change the number of results without having to edit the view. It's easy to create a settings page that will allow you to configure the number of results.
Erik:
Section Fronts can mean a lot of different things. But in general they are a page that aggregates stories around a topic or section. I will run through using the Views Arguments Extras module to easily implement a section front concept in drupal.
Irakli:
The ability to write self-contained modules (thank you, Hooks API!) and a very flexible theming layer are two important aspects behind the power and extensibility of Drupal. The following blog post describes how to leverage this power and write "proper" modules - modules that externalize all rendering logic into TPLs, suggest default implementation but allow themers to override default TPLs if needed. Several use-cases are discussed.
Brad :
Sometimes you might need some extra help getting views to sort correctly. This is especially the case when sorting on a column that might include NULL values, or when your criteria for how results should sort is complex. Instead of implementing template logic to correct the result sorting, you can use hook_views_query_alter to modify the sort criteria in the query itself.
Tobby :
Sometimes, the node data that you want is not exposed to Views in the way that you want. Computed Field is a module that, with a little bit of raw PHP code, can help you bridge those gaps.
Eric :
I finally got around to it.
Irakli:
This has happened couple times, already, so I may as well blog about it. If you use Views in Drupal, you already know that it shows you the final SQL generated. Very useful feature, but there's a rare edge condition when the SQL returns results (if you run it from an SQL client), but Views shows zero elements. Extremely frustrating and confusing.
How can this happen?
