The Views UI is a great tool for administrators to manipulate and configure a view. In this video, we'll start our dive into the Views UI.

• Go to "Structure => Views" (admin/structure/views)
• Click "Edit" next to “Archive”

Administrative Settings

There are many ways to present data from a given view. These are called “Displays” and you can add a display by clicking "+ Add" and choosing the display type that you want. Some contributed modules will add additional display types. For example, Ctools comes with a sub-module “Views content panes” which adds a “Content Pane” display type that can be used with something like Panels.

To the right is a link where you can edit the View name and description as well as add Views tag by clicking "edit view name/description". If you click the dropdown arrow, you also have options to:

• Analyze the view (This will look for anything that might cause the view not to function properly.)
• Clone the view (If you’d like another view (or set of Views displays) similar to the one you are working on, with minor tweaks, you can clone a view and make the modifications to the new view.)
• Export the view (You can export views and then import them into other sites, or other environments. We'll do this in the last video of this series.)
• Reorder the displays (If you’d like the Block display to be listed before the page display, or if you have a large number of displays, and would like to group them, you can reorder them here.)
• Revert the view (Because this view came with the module in code, you can revert it to the default settings here. This will also be available to views that are imported from code.)

Page details

Our next option is the Display name. You can click here and rename the display. This only affects how it is displayed within the Views interface. Beside that there is another dropdown. This one contains links to:

• View the page
• Clone the page (This will just clone the page display, not the entire view)
• Delete the page (This deletes the page display, leaving the others in tact)
• Disable the page (This simply deactivates the page display. All of the settings are saved, but the page will not be accessible.)

Basic Settings

The next section down has three columns, the first column contains the Basic Settings which includes Title, Format, Fields, Filter Criteria and Sort Criteria. These settings are the ones really essential to your views and when you click any of these controls it will bring up an overlay where you make your changes. For example, in the Format settings, when I click "unformatted list", I get an overlay for changing the format of the views display. I'll choose "Grid" and click "Apply(all displays)". Now I'm taken to another overlay for additional options that apply to grids. I’m going to cancel this, and click "Cancel" on the main view page to undo any changes I’ve made. Now, I’ll click “Edit” to get back into the settings page.

Page Settings

The middle column depends on what display you are editing and since this is a page, it shows page settings. If we'll click "block" in the list of Displays, it changes from Page Settings to Block Settings. I'll go back to the Page settings by clicking the "Page" display.

Advance Settings

Finally, you have Advance settings in the last column. We have to click on the "Advanced" link to reveal the advance settings. These give more advanced features than the basic settings such as contextual filters and relationships. Advanced settings also control features such as the use of AJAX, use of caching and removing duplicate results.

Live Preview

At the bottom is the Preview which allows you to quickly test your view to see if it is displaying what you expect. Here we have the list of months and we can even click on one to see the posts from that month.

In the next few videos we’ll be creating a View from scratch that will display a list of products for sale, so in the next video we will create a content type with the appropriate fields as well as create the products we will display in our View.