Adding a Block Display to a View

Adding a Block Display to a View with Blake Hall This tutorial covers how to add a block display to a View. By the end of this tutorial, you'll know how to add a block display to the Recipes view to display the most recent recipes in a sidebar and change its configuration without changing the existing Recipes page view. Before you get started with this tutorial, you'll want to make sure you know what Views are and the basics of how they're constructed. You'll also want to make sure you've created the listing page Recipe view. In addition, your site will have to have recipe content items with the main image field. It's also a good idea that a few of these items are already created, so we have content that will show up in the View display we're about to build. From our site, we're going to navigate to the Views administration interface by clicking Structure and then Views. From here, we're going to find the Recipes view and edit it by clicking on the Edit button. Alternatively, we could have navigated to the Recipes page from the main site navigation and then clicked Edit view in the contextual link in the main area of the page. Now that we're on the Administration page for the Recipes view, we're going to create a new block display by clicking Add under Displays. From this dropdown, we're going to add a new block display. The new display is created and the focus is automatically switched to its configuration. To change the title of this display, we'll click a block from under the Display name field. The name and description of this display popup appears. We can change the Administrative name to Recent recipes and click Apply. To change the title of the block, click Recipes in the title field under Title. In the popup that appears we'll select This block under the For select list, that changes it to This block override. We'll change the title to New recipes and click Apply for this display only. To change the block style, click Grid in the format field under Format. In the popup that appears, we're going to select This block override from the For select list, then we'll select Unformatted list and click Apply for this display. You can further configure the style options in the next popup that appears. We're going to accept the defaults and then click Apply. To configure the image field, we'll click Content main image under Fields. In the popup that appears we'll again select This block override in the For select list, then we'll select the Image style Thumbnail instead of Medium, and then we'll click Apply for this display. To remove ingredients as a filter, click Content, Ingredients exposed under Filter criteria. In the popup that appears select This block override in the For select list, and then we'll click Remove at the bottom, To configure how we want Content sorted in the View, click Add from the dropdown button under Sort criteria. In the popup that appears, in the For select list, we'll again, say, This block override, we'll check Authored on as our criteria, and then click Apply for this display. In this configuration popup, we're going to select Sort descending to have the most recent recipes appear first, and then will click Apply for this display. To specify the number of items that will be displayed, click Mini in the Use pager field. In the popup that appears we'll again select This block override. Under Pager we're going to select Display a specified number of items, and then we'll click Apply for this display. We're going to choose to select 5 for the number of items to display, and then click Apply. With these changes in place to our Recent recipes view we're ready to click Save. With our block display added to the View, we can now place this in the sidebar region. See the video on Placing Blocks if you need help. But in order to see it in action, let's navigate back to the homepage. It's worth noting I've already placed the block in the video but here you can see it showing up in our second sidebar region. In this tutorial we added a new block display to our Recipes view. We then modified the display settings for this block so the information it would show is different than that from the page view. It's important to note that these settings are independent of the listing page settings that's why we we're clicking This display override. We then placed our new block display in the sidebar to see it in action on our site.