One of Drupal 7's great advances was full-featured View modes. Much has been written about them, but many site builders fall to see the benefit of using them. I'll explain them purpose -- and their power -- in simple terms that an intermediate site builder can understand.

Will discuss benefits of View modes, including:

• Ease of maintenance, when using many node bundles: As long as you select the correct view mode, no need to worry about which bundle of node it is.
• Performance: Avoid adding fields to Views; use a View mode to abstract the View's output.
  • Also enables use of render_cache contrib module.

We'll also briefly discuss templates/processing vs. view modes, to see the maintainability and performance gains of view modes. We'll look at some code, but nothing more than a preprocessor and template file.