Using Views to Create Nodes with Related Content

Back in the days of Drupal 4 and 5 there was a popular module called Contemplate. This module allowed the site designer to modify the default node.tpl by adding PHP code or re-arranging node fields as required. This tpl was then stored ion the db.

This module still exists but has no ability (short of writing PHP code) to modify node templates to include related content (i.e. content from other nodes which are related to the primary node via something like a nodereference or userreference field.

But, what about Views? Views for Drupal 6 provides an extremely powerful yet simple to use tool for gathering related content. Should it not be possible to use this to "re-template" a node. If we could re-template a node then all teasers and full node views of a node would now contain the related content that we are interested in. So, any further Views we created as, for example, "teaser views" would contain this related content without having to design them separately. And even more useful, the full node view or page for a node would also contain this related content.

Keep reading... here's how to do it.