We are excited to announce that three key modules, Views, CCK, and Organic Groups, have published release candidates today, ready for testing. If you are interested in speeding the transition to a full release, install and test the Release Candidates (RC).

Hooray!

This screencast provides a 34 minute overview of the new features that Views 2 offers. This video shows off not all the new features, but it is a good starting point if you want to learn how to use Views 2

First make a dynamically filtered view on the fly like the big boys do!

Then, stick it in a panel!

And all this is done without knowing how to really program. That's powerful stuff.

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.

You might be interested to know about a new view type that's now included in the image module: an image gallery view for image nodes.This is in the latest 5.x-2.x-dev release of image. Existing galleries and blocks are reimplemented as views.

Nifty, I was waiting for this. There's even very detailed documentation on using the image module and views in Drupal to generate your galleries. Link to the CVS commit of the image module using views for galleries.