How to edit the text above or below a view.

This article only applies to Advanced Site Editors such as Nigel!

Certain pages on the BWARS site contain dynamically generated lists of other content and are not built using the normal Create content menu item, rather they use the Views module. This is a powerful tool for reporting on any information held in Drupal, including nodes (content), users, terms etc. An example is the Download page.

A view can be output as part of another page, e.g. on the Home page for news and forum posts, or can be output as a page in its own right such as the Download page. When output as a page a view has a header and footer setting to provide content to appear above or below the view such as an explanation. Here's how to configure it:

First, go to Site building > Views > List on the menu. This shows you an admin screen to list the existing views. Search for the one that you are trying to edit (e.g. downloads) and click the edit link for that view. This takes you to the View editor, which looks pretty complex at first. If you want to know how to use it then there are many resources on the web - try Googling for Drupal 6 Views and you will find videos such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV__oOckAPM.

Fortunately what we need to do to configure the header or footer is pretty simple. As the header we will supply only applies to the view when displayed as a page, click Page immediately under the word Defaults on the left. This is because a view can have a default setup, plus several other "outputs" each of which can provide a additional settings - so we want to configure the view when it is output onto a page. Under Basic settings look for header and click on the word to the right (what the word here says depends on whether there is already some information in the header). Look down the page a bit and you will find a text box has appeared into which you can type your header. Unfortunately the Views module does not integrate with the text editor we use on the site, so you don't get the helpful toolbar, but this box does accept basic HTML and links etc.

Once you are done, click Update default display then make sure you also click Save to store the changes permanently.