I’ve been “very close” to thinking Views is ready for a 1.0 release for awhile now. Really, too long. And, of course, now I’m even closer. I feel a little bit like I’m living Xeno’s Paradox on this one, where I first must go halfway. And then halfway. And halfway. And half. Half. 1/2. .

Seriously, this weekend’s flurry of Views-related activity really reduced the issue queue significantly. There are still some tricky issues with taxonomy that I have to sort out…that structure really is one heck of a bitch to write queries for, which makes it even more fun to generate queries for. One of the problems I run into with it is that fields and filters may or may not refer to the same taxonomy information. I keep running into bugs when using multiple taxonomies, but fixing them breaks behavior that’s expected when fields refer to the taxonomy you’re filtering on. It’s enough to make me feel insane.

On the plus side, I’ve folded the viewfeed module directly into Views now. Views doesn’t support RSS natively, but by enabling the packaged views_rss.module, RSS comes for fee. But the bonus is that the feed selector is pluggable. I submitted a patch against the atom.module which allows it to provide atom feeds the same way RSS feeds may be provided. I’m hoping that other people will be overjoyed by this, and we’ll see other alternate methods of viewing lists of content, such as PDF or OPML or whatever the heck else people can think of. Tho RSS and Atom almost certainly cover most of what people might want.

I also created a theming wizard tool, which is also its own module. (Yes, there are now 4 modules in the Views package). The theming wizard lets you select a view and it generates some code to help making theming a great deal easier, solving the problem of having to figure out what fields, and even making it into a nice PHPTemplate .tpl.php file for you. I think this’ll be a great benefit. I’d like to see the tool expanded to include other generators, since there are quite a few interesting theme styles (particularly ones that do grouping) and with a tool like this one difficult to use aspect of Views is, hopefully, a little easier.

I still have to update the API docs, but other than that and fixing the last few really hard bugs in the queue, I think we’re <b>this</b> close to 1.0 release, and actually changing my tag out for a branch. Not that this means anything at all to most people.

Also, is it just me or did freenode eat itself today?