Views

Listing of content and data is always an important capability content management systems covet; this is what Views provides in Drupal 8, and it does so well.

If you've been building (not even necessarily developing) sites in previous versions of Drupal, you'll understand everything with this simple phrase--Views is now in Drupal core. If you haven't, Views has always been a staple Drupal contributed module used on probably all Drupal installations to a certain extent and is an indispensable tool for site builders and even developers.

The purpose of the Views module is to expose data and content in a way that allows the creation of configurable listings. It includes things such as filters, sorts, display options, and many other features. As developers, we often find a need to write our own field or filter plugin to work with Views or expose data from our custom entities or external data sources.

Views is a core Drupal 8 module tied to the general architecture and used for most list pages (especially, admin pages) provided by Drupal core. Although it's a very site building-oriented tool, in this book, we will take a look at how we can create plugins that extend its capabilities to offer site builders even more.