I bet it won’t surprise anyone that I might blog about Views, here and there. After all, I’ve spent a great deal of time with it, and I’m very excited about its potential, and what it can do.

As excited as I am by it, I do keep finding myself running up against various limitations.

• Views can’t easily add itself as a tab attached to someone’s account. The only reasonable way I can think to implement this is to do it as an external module.
• Taxonomy is so darn flexible that views actually can’t do some operations that appear simple, because to do them you have to assume things about taxonomy. One good example is simply displaying all terms attached to a node. Because SELECT queries require you to know exactly what kind and how much data you’re collecting, and taxonomy is inherently variable, this is difficult to do in a single select.
• It doesn’t support group by, though I think I can add that one without serious trouble.
• I don’t really have everything that needs to be in there for filters, especially in terms of operators and special types. For example, we have a ‘date’ type in forms api that Views can’t really take advantage of.

There’s also a long, long list of things I need/want to do to Views.

• Hiliting the Add Field/Argument/Sort/Filter box to make it less likely to be mistaken for a field/argument/sort/filter that already exists.
• User-filters. Example: Project module. I’ve made a start on this code, but it turns out to be fairly complex. What I’m doing is making it so that filters can be ‘exposed’, but part of the problem I run into is that an admin may not want to expose an entire filter (to which I fear I have to say ‘tough’, fix it in theme) and the other is that I haven’t completely implemented things like operators and dates. Dates are extra important for this kind of task, where they’re much less important for what Views currently does.
• Group-By — I’ve got a pretty good handle on how I want to implement this one now, though.
• Workflow, event, flexinode module integration. Flexinode may never happen; or it may happen only for the basicest of the basic types.
• views blog — a blog replacement based on views.
• views attach — a way to attach a view to any URL that has an argument. Example: user/X/bookmarks. Mostly it’s a question of making the tab appear, but it also requires rearranging things so that X becomes an argument to the view. The only way I can think to do it is as an add-on module.
• views feed manager — a way to declare which Views provide feeds, provide those feeds, and advertise those feeds.
• views bookmarks — this one is actually almost done, but I realized one thing I’m missing. Basically it creates a generic ‘mark’ that can be put on a node, on either a per user or a global basis. It’s just a flag, but you can then create views based on the flags. The flags can be named however the admin wants. (currently in CVS as views_bookmarks; I’m not sure it’s ready for primetime).
• views calendar — basically a replacement for the archive module. It requires the external filters above.
• Validation. Views barely validates the admin form, and I need to go back and do that. It’s not an insignificant task.

I’m sure there are other things I haven’t remembered that need to go on this list. It’s a lot of things to do. Anybody want to tackle any of ‘em? (particularly the external stuff).