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:

The Display links checkbox will be super handy -- sometimes you really want a node/teaser view, but don't want to deal with the links list below!

I'm most excited about the other styles. The familiar List and Table views are there, but also two options that would probably solve 10% of questions asked in #drupal-support -- a Grid and Unformatted style! Yes, no more constant list-style-type: none. The unformatted style outputs markup like this:

<div class="view-content">
  <div class="views-field-title">
    <span class="field-content"><a href="/node/4">Valde Metuo Si Sit</a></span>
  </div>
</div>

And the Grid style gives you the option for number of columns, and alignment:

Here's an unformatted view (shown here with the ajax pager option, just to show off):

There is also an alternate Pager style defined, the mini pager (shown here with a 2x2 grid block view):

A couple other favourites: users in views! Also the Offset is now available in the UI, so you can, say, have one view at the top that displays the latest 3 nodes, and then show another 5 nodes in a view below, starting at node #4.

User Interface

The tabs on the left of the view editing screen allow you to add and switch between the different "Displays".

Ajaxy goodness is used for the settings, so there's no more reloading the whole page for adding fields or adjusting settings. The Save button at the bottom actually submits your changes to the view configuration.

Also I'd like to point out the blue ? icons, which is the work of the Advanced Help module. This module adds extensive inline help (or at least, it will ;) to Views, with popups explaining the various features. The link hovers also provide basic tooltip help.

Also, you can add multiple fields at one time via checkboxes, which is a HUGE time savings.

Concluding Thoughts

It's going to take me a while to wrap my head around just what this module can do, much like it has been a challenge with the big leap to Panels 2. All in all, these are incredible improvements and they are going to make building Drupal sites a much easier endeavour for non-developers, and certainly make the process more pleasant. I know this post only scratches the surface of Views 2, but I just wanted to help get others excited about what's coming. I can't really speak to the stability or completeness of the module, but I believe it is essentially feature complete now and could certainly use the help of others testing it out.

A huge kudos and thank you to Merlin and everyone who has made this module possible.