A short history

Drupal is an open source content management system used by over 1,200,000 websites. It started as a message board written by Dries Buytaert in 2000 while in college at University of Antwerp. The original site Dries built was drop.org, a mistake when he went to register dorp.org, dorp being Dutch for village. When he decided to open source the software in January 2000, he named it Drupal.

Views has been described as the report writer for Drupal. It is that and a whole lot more.

Drupal progressed rapidly through many revisions, with Drupal 4 released in June 2002, Drupal 5 in January 2007, Drupal 6 in February 2008, and Drupal 7 in January 2010. Drupal 8, which is a major rearchitecting of Drupal, has taken almost 5 years, a third of Drupal's total lifetime, to be completed.

In May 2006, a contributed CCK module, Content Construction Kit, was released for Drupal 4.7 and became the standard for defining fields via the user interface, replacing the older Flexinode module, which dates back to February 2004. Before this, any modifications to the basic structure of a node would require manually defining database tables for a field and creating all the functions to create, edit, display, and delete the field when the corresponding node is changed or viewed.

The Views module was first created (at least the first commit was made to it) on November 25, 2005. The first release, 4.6.x-1.x-dev, was on December 1, 2005. The first non-development release, 4.7.x-1.0, was almost a year later on November 11, 2006. The first release contained 3,177 executable lines of PHP. The current Drupal 7 release of Views contains 57,155 lines of non-comment PHP. Its supporting module, CTools, contains another 39,939 lines. The Drupal 8 version of Views contains 58,925 lines, with most of CTools absorbed into Drupal core. Just as telling is that Drupal 8 Views has 19,921 lines of tests, where Drupal 7 only has 9,238 and Drupal 4.7 has none.

Before the Views module, any display not contained in the Drupal core or a contributed module required manually creating the necessary SQL queries, executing them against MySQL (at the time the only database supported by Drupal), and then taking the results and formatting them into HTML. This required significant PHP and MySQL programming experience. With the release of Views, users with limited programming experience could create powerful displays from the user interface.

At the time of writing, Views for Drupal 7 has almost 600 supporting contributed modules. As of the release of Drupal 8, Views for Drupal 8 has 65 supporting contributed modules, but many module contributors are just starting to port modules to Drupal 8, so the number will rise dramatically in the months to come.