DraggableViews

The Views module is an incredibly powerful resource, so it's no wonder it has become one of the most widely-used contributed modules in the Drupal community. Views is fantastic at making it easy to provide different (and sometime very complicated) ways of pulling out lists of data from your site content.

Views even gives you a wealth of options on how your list will be ordered. You can specify any number of criteria, the order of importance, and so on. One thing Views hasn't been able to let you do, however, is to assign an arbitrary order to the list. That is, assign an a definite order that has nothing to with attributes of content itself. Put simply, sometimes the client just wants it in a certain order.

Sure, you could add a CCK number field and sort based on that. If you really knew what you were doing you could even leverage the draggable table capability built into Drupal so a client can intuitively reorganize the content to their heart's content.

DraggableViews works in a similar way, providing a numeric field that can be used as the sort criteria, and a draggable table view that can be used to set the values, thereby ordering your content graphically.

Your first time through the setup does seem to require a number of non-obvious steps, but within a few minutes you should be able to put together a simple click-and-drag interface that will allow non-technical site administrators to easily order content.

It may be a very specific need this module fulfills, but it does indeed deliver.

I have two (very) minor gripes: First, the setup seems a bit complicated, perhaps the developer should provide a preconfigured view with two displays (one for the public, and one for admins to sort content) as a reference for people who aren't good at following step-by-step directions.

Second, It would be great if they could figure out how to make a draggable grid, since there are times (ordering a photo gallery, for example) when the one-entry-per-row presentation will lead to unnecessarily long lists. It would be great if they could figure out how to also offer a draggable grid.

All in all, this is a module you won't need on every site, when when you do need it you'll find it invaluable.