Discovered Semantic Views
Drupal has an unbelievably good module called Views. Views is created by merlinofchaos. I'm guessing that's not what his parents christened him but, like rappers, he has adopted this moniker within his work. Merlinofchaos is something of a God within the Drupal world, responsible for massive developments in the open source CMS. All Content Management Systems are built on top of a database. They do a lot of accessing and writing to and from the database themselves. But sometimes you want to define what goes in to the database and then direct what comes out of the database.
In and Out
Defining what goes in can be done with a superb module called Content Construction Kit (CCK). Pulling information out is done with Views.
Drupal is well known for being arguably the most powerful and versatile CMS. In order to do this it sacrifices some user-friendliness. It's basically quite hard to figure out how to access the best bits. The learning curve is extremely steep. Views is no exception to this. Because it will pull virtually any information out of your database and arrange it in any way for you, there are a whole LOAD of options available. This makes it very complicated, as the screenshot attached to this article will demonstrate. Also, whilst it's good at pulling the data out, it's very difficult indeed to present it in a good-looking way. This is where Semantic Views comes in. It simply allows you to apply your HTML tags and CSS selectors to the rows and items that are pulled out of the database, displaying them as you wish within your theme. The way to do this before was to basically re-create a php file (ok from a template but still a bit nasty) and then select this theme file within views. Complicated.
I find that Drupal is wonderfully good but its creators and users are often wonderfully bad at describing how to access and use it. This squares with what the creator of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, has expressed: he wants Drupal 7 to be much more easy to access for everyday people and non-specialists. Here is a nice blog article describing this.
Hats off to 'Bangpound' and his team for doing some of this already with Semantic Views.