Using Drupal, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Job Posting Board

This chapter outlines the two most powerful features in Drupal. Yes, we’re saying outright that the two most powerful features are fields and views. The Field module (and its corresponding Field UI module, which provides an administrative interface) comes with core and allows you to customize existing entity forms in Drupal by adding a variety of fields—such as checkboxes, select lists, file uploads, and several others—all without writing a line of code. The Views module is the natural counterpart to Field, letting you get data out of your site rather than into it. Views allow you to create pages and blocks that pull data back out and display it to your visitors. Want a paged table showing product details that can be sorted by price or manufacturer? You can build it with Field and Views. Want to display a block that lists the fans of a particular artist in a grid as a set of user photo thumbnails? You can build it with Field and Views. Anywhere there’s a list of content on your website (and most websites are almost all just lists of content in one form or another), Field and Views are the two key modules you need.

The Field and Views modules form the foundation of nearly every other project in this book and most of the Drupal-powered websites on the Internet. We’ll cover how to set up a new content type and customize the node form so that you can add any type of field for inputting data. We’ll configure a site that allows the creation of ...