Views 2 hit beta recently and this felt like a good time to jump onboard and check it out. I've only been playing with it for a couple of hours, but this definitely feels like the biggest change I've encountered when going from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.

Bear in mind that I am not a developer, so I can't really comment on the vast changes under the hood, but I wanted to highlight some initial first impressions from a themer/site builder's perspective.

Features

One of the hugest changes so far is the ability to build multiple Displays off one View. Not just a page view and a block view, but you can set up many different views and adjust the settings on each one.

Here's an overview of the view editing screen:

You'll see things here that you'll be familiar with from Views 1 -- some of the basic settings, Arguments, Fields, Sorting, Filters, etc. These work as you'd expect if you've used Views before.

Style & Row Style

There are now several more configuration options for the style of the view. You can choose between a Node and Field for your Row Style. As a Node, you get the following options: