What a glorious occasion to celebrate. I did a little digging and, when comparing the original version to the current latest version there are only two lines that remain from that original version:

So the code base has grown slightly since then, has it? :-)

Yay, Views!

Reading that forum post does give a feeling of history in the making. I esp; love that part :
"The module is currently named 'nodequery'. I'll rename it to 'views' (or
something else if a better name comes up) but I've had trouble having the Right
Name come to me."
And the face of earth would be different...(+ a great "Nodequery 2 now lists users !" annoucement)

Happy birthday Earl !

quoth Eaton:
"...should make answering quite a few 'how do I..?' questions LOADS easier."
Three years later, the T-Shirt

very entertaining, i was wasting time last night reading through OLD drupal stuff - imagine where views would be without this:

http://drupal.org/node/240

hi Sir, could pls take a look to my post http://drupal.org/node/343762
I could pay for your support
thanks in advance

I have been so happy happy with my new views 6. Incredible job despite all the moaning and groaning I may have initially done. Now I only make those noises when I have to go back to views 5. You deserve an award for best drupal module UI.
-----------------
Great job.

This is one great module for the ever great drupal. Without which Clipped.in would have been a nightmare. Thank you for the great module and keep up the good work.

I just had something fun using your views module that I don't think I have ever had happen with any other web application. I was building the fields list of a complex view, patiently working multiple windows to let views do its thinking between each field, when on one field addition it failed on a contributed field type. It would not load the next new field and a windows confirmation box even popped up reporting the fatal error. Yikes, my heart stopped, as with any "normal" web app I would have been doomed to start the entire field addition project all over again, about an hour's work. Yet the browser window reset to the good field I had just tried to update, so what the heck, I clicked to submit it again. And didn't your views program just hop over the erroneous field and continue on to the next field in the list. Fine error handling, on top of the amazing results that views produces. It's small touches like that which make a user feel respected.

In the light of the article "Views, Panels, Economy Of Front End Code, And Classes And Namespace" I wanted a chance to say a big thank you for the work put into views. For me it has opened up a whole new aspect of Drupal and added a great deal of richness to the sites I design. I am just NOT a hard coder, Views allows me to concentrate on delivering what the client needs and more. So Really well done and keep up the good work!

Regards

Joe

Hi Earl / Merlin,

Thanks so much for your work on Views and Panels.

I attended the D4D camp in Boston, and I think it was an important step forward in bringing design to be of equal importance to development within Drupal, and the Drupal community. However, I can understand your great concern about the many pointed comments that were made at D4D about the HTML output of the Views and Panels modules.

I am an "end user" of Drupal (for genomics research) and both design and development are important for me. I think it is critically important for Drupal to become stronger in the design area. However, it also is critically important for me to be able to use Views to easily generate complex SQL queries to present data and text in useful and visually pleasing ways. I do not expect Views to provide ultra clean HTML, or "pixel perfect" representations of the data and images displayed, which are exactly the points that you made in your recent post: Views, Panels, economy of front end code, and classes and namespace.

I think that several factors have come together to create a (hopefully temporary) negative situation for you as a result of the D4D discussions: first, I think that many of the designers who were at D4D are fairly new to Drupal, and to the code development world, and they have no idea how important and unique Views, and also Panels, are for Drupal, or how much work it has taken to create them.

Second, I think that the designers have always felt - and accurately so - that they have not been properly regarded as "first class citizens" within the Drupal community. This needs to be changed, and a major point of the D4D camp was to take steps to bring about this change. As an attendee of D4D, I had the sense that many of the developers felt like they were being given a real voice in the Drupal community for the first time, and some of them were very free in expressing their previous frustrations.

Third, I also had the impression that a number of the designers who were most vocal in their complaints happened to be rather strong-minded individuals with little experience in working in open source projects, or in the Drupal project in particular. Having participated in - and/or carefully watched - several other open source communities (Perl, Ruby on Rails, etc), I have seen first-hand the importance of maintaining a positive and constructive level of dialogue regarding problems that need to be addressed. I think that some of the comments made by designers at D4D were unnecessarily strong and negative, and would have been much more carefully worded if they had more experience working within the Drupal community.

Fourth - and quite relevant here - is that as essentially the sole author of the Views and Panels modules, you have felt personally attacked by some of the comments about those modules. This is extremely unfortunate, because it really reflects just how important those modules are - which is why they keep getting used - and how important your own personal contribution has been in this area. It is natural for you to feel personally offended by such pointed comments.

So, let me say again, in bold: Thanks so much for your work on Views and Panels.

I hope that you will continue to be motivated to work on Views and Panels, and that the developers and designers within the Drupal community can find a positive balance between constructive input, and appreciation for hard work by others.

Best regards,

Michael Caudy (mcaudy)