views

using the term "content management system" to describe the drupal cms understates it's full potential. i prefer to consider drupal a web-application development-system, particularly suitable for content-heavy projects.

what are the fantastic four?

drupal's application development potential is provided in large-part by a set of "core" modules that dovetail to provide an application platform that other modules and applications build on. these modules have become a de-facto standard: drupal's fantastic four. our superheros are cck, views, panels and cck field types and widgets. if you are considering using drupal to build a website of any sophistication, you can't overlook these.

out of the box, the views module allows you to specify access to the view according to user role. this is a critical feature, but sometimes it's not enough. for example, sometimes you may want the view access to depend on the arguments to the view.

specifically, let's suppose that we have implemented facebook-style threaded mail, and we want to use a view to display all the messages in a thread. the thread id is an argument passed to the view. we only wish to allow the view to be accessed by one of the authors of the thread, or users with the 'administer messages' permission.

here's a three step approach to resolving this dilemna :