This message, with the email address removed out of courtesy, was received this morning. I left in the original he replied to as context.

You get the emails because you created the module. Are you surprised?
There's not great of documentation on how to expand your module, there's
no FAQ, or anything of the sort.

Unfortunately, that's just another thing wrong with drupal. Besides being
overly hard to learn / use, and new (non-backwards compatible) versions
every 6 months or so, there seems to be a huge lack of support for
modules.

I suppose it's an obvious symptom of lacking basic features straight out

As of today, requests for support via email (i.e, my contact form either here or on drupal.org) will be denied.

I’ve received four of them today, and I’m appalled. Normally I do what I can to help people who email me, but this is starting to snowball out of control. I’m not your technical support. There are channels for that. There’s the drupal.org support forums. There’s #drupal-support. If there are bugs or you think there are bugs, there’s the issues queue. But emailing me directly is rather rude. I’m sorry that my software is confusing, I really am. But honestly, would you rather I stop working on it entirely because I’ve run out of resources for it? And yea, usually if I’m in the IRC and you ask me there (publically) I’ll help you out.

Khalid gives us a great recipe for combining CCK, Views and imagecache to create different sized images in different views. This is an interesting look at the power available when combining CCK, Views and enough knowledge to manipulate them to do what you want, not what they want to do.

A quick review of both the #drupal IRC channel and the activity on the dev list is that, despite everything, Drupal’s new release system is a little confusing. And, truth to be told, it is a little confusing. In my [not so] humble opinion, this is not the fault of the implementation or the design of the system, but more the fault that Drupal users and developers have gotten accustomed to a system that sort of worked, but left a lot to be desired.

To start with, the original system worked well for Drupal core itself. This meant that a fair number of people, who primarily deal with core, never really got to get face to face with the problems that manifested on the contrib repository. But that’s a relatively small group of people, and all of them are very smart people. While it took some good arguing, the bulk of them were convinced that the new way is a better way, and thus the improvements actually came to pass.

Thanks to Derek's fantastic work on the Drupal release system, I am now happy to be able to announce that Views 1.1 for Drupal 4.7 and Views 1.1-beta for Drupal 5 are now available.

Views 4.7.x-1.1 release notes and download link.
Views 5.x-1.1-beta release notes and download link.

Thanks to KarenS, who has become a very prolific Views’ contributor, we finally have the calendar app I’ve been wanting. It integrates with Views beautifully, and it finishes the demolition of the archive.module that I so desperately wanted to be rid of. It is the last piece, and now Views + Calendar can do everything archive.module did — and so much more.

Click here for a demo of the project.

So you have Views, and you've figured out exposed filters. Which, in short, gives nice handy little widgets to search. Often by keyword or by some taxonomy term.

Now what you want to do is put that functionality in a block. Say you're doing a catalog search or you have something you just want to always be up.

No Problem!

I’m noticing more and more modules using Views, and there’s a class of modules springing up that specifically expand Views, which is awesome, because that’s exactly the kind of thing I’d hoped would happen with this module.

In particular, there’s some AJAXY stuff springing up — and I noticed a few days ago that a module to do node editing using Views as a framework has been checked in. It’s called Edit View — people interested in this should check it out.

I came across a post on drupal.org which included a flash MP3 player that can use playlists. And it took me only a few minutes to realize this would be a great use of Views — to do something with Views that is very much an alternative output format.

So I did it, and added it to the Views Bonus Pack.

An example is here. As you can see it can work as a page or a block (though that player is a bit large as a block. Or if you prefer the Drupal 5 version.

One of my two talks at DrupalCon (the one about article publication) is now available as an mp3; there was no video, though video probably isn’t terribly necessary for this one. The audio, and some others, is available here.

An infrequent but relatively common issue I've run into with Views is that when showing teasers, a common number of posts per page is 10; but when showing the single lines from the summary, 25 is much more common. But Views doesn't let you change the page size in summary view mode.

Note: If you don't know what summary view mode is, this page is a summary (what happens when a view has an argument and the argument is not present), while this page is the view when an argument is present.

Panels 2.0 design

After giving this a great deal of thought, I have worked up a preliminary design for Panels 2.0. My primary design goal with this is flexibility, so that panels can be used in a variety of situations. The example situations I have come up with are the following: