Creating a paginated article list in Drupal 10 with Views

Desired outcome

Create a public‑facing page that displays nodes of a specific content type (e.g., Article) in batches of ten items, with next/previous navigation links provided by Drupal’s core Views pager.

Prerequisites

• A working Drupal 10 installation with the core Views module enabled.
• At least one content type (e.g., Article) that contains a handful of published nodes for testing.
• A theme that does not override or hide the Views pager markup (the default themes such as Olivero or Claro work out‑of‑the‑box).
• Access to the Drupal admin interface with the “Administrator” role, or equivalent permissions to create views and clear caches.
• (Optional) Drush 10+ installed and available from the command line for cache rebuilds and configuration export.

Procedure

1. Create the view
   1. Log in to the admin UI and navigate to Structure → Views → Add new view.
   2. In the View name field, enter a descriptive name, e.g., Article List.
   3. Under Show, select Content of type and choose the content type you want to list (e.g., Article).
   4. Check the box Create a page.
   5. Set the Page title (optional) and the Path where the page will be reachable, e.g., /articles.
   6. Leave Display format as Format: HTML list (or choose Table or Grid as preferred) and click Save and edit.
2. Add fields to the view
   1. In the view editor, locate the FIELDS section and click Add.
   2. Select the fields you want to display, for example:
   • Content: Title
   • Content: Authored by
   • Content: Post date
   3. For each field, configure the label, formatter, and whether to exclude from display (if you only need the value for sorting or filtering).
   4. Click Apply (all displays) after adding each field.
3. Configure the pager
   1. In the PAGER section, click the link that reads Use pager: Full pager (if it shows something else, click to change it).
   2. In the pager settings modal, set Items per page to 10.
   3. Optionally enable Expose items per page widget if you want visitors to choose a different page size.
   4. Click Apply to save the pager configuration.
4. Save the view
   1. At the top of the view editor, click Save.
   2. Drupal will return you to the Views overview page; the new view should appear in the list with a status of Enabled.
5. Verify the page
   1. Open a browser and navigate to the path you defined, e.g., https://example.com/articles.
   2. Confirm that the first ten nodes of the chosen content type appear.
   3. Check that pagination links (usually labeled “‹ previous” and “next ›”) are present at the bottom of the list.
   4. Click the “next” link and verify that the next set of up to ten nodes loads without a full page reload error.

Expected checks

• HTTP status code 200 for the view page and each paginated request (use browser dev tools → Network tab).
• No PHP warnings or 500 errors in the Drupal watchdog (Reports → Recent log messages).
• The rendered HTML contains a <ul class="item-list"> or equivalent markup for the list items, and a <nav> element with pager links.
• If you exposed an items‑per‑page widget, changing the selection updates the items_per_page query parameter and the list length accordingly.

Recovery options

If the view does not behave as expected, you can revert or troubleshoot using the following steps:

1. Clear caches – either via the admin UI (Configuration → Development → Performance → Clear all caches) or with Drush:

# Run from the Drupal root directory
# Requires file system access and sufficient permissions to execute Drush
drush cr

2. Check view status – ensure the view is enabled:

drush views:list --status

3. Verify permissions – the anonymous user (or the role you are testing with) must have the View published content permission for the selected content type.
4. Inspect for theme overrides – temporarily switch to a core theme (Olivero or Claro) to see if the pager appears; if it does, your custom theme may be hiding it via CSS (display: none;) or overriding the Views template.
5. Re‑create the view – if the configuration appears corrupted, delete the view (Structure → Views → Edit → Delete) and repeat the procedure.
6. Rollback configuration – if you exported the view to configuration before making changes, you can import it back:

# Export (run once after the view is working)
drush config:export --yes --dependency=views.view.article_list

# To restore later
drush config:import --yes --dependency=views.view.article_list

Limitations and practical verification

• Large result sets can increase memory usage; consider enabling the view’s built‑in caching (Advanced → Caching) or adding exposed filters to limit the dataset.
• Views caching may conflict with aggressive page‑caching strategies (e.g., Internal Page Cache or External CDN). Ensure the view’s cache tags or max‑age align with your site’s performance policy.
• Custom themes sometimes override the Views pager template (views-view.html.twig or views-mini-pager.html.twig). If pagination links disappear, inspect the theme’s templates directory for such overrides.
• To verify the pager object programmatically, you can bootstrap Drupal and load the view:

setDisplay('page_1');
  $view->execute();
  $pager = $view->getPager();
  echo 'Total items: ' . $pager->getTotalItems() . PHP_EOL;
  echo 'Items per page: ' . $pager->getItemsPerPage() . PHP_EOL;
  echo 'Current page: ' . ($pager->getCurrentPage() + 1) . PHP_EOL;
} else {
  echo 'View not found.' . PHP_EOL;
}
?>

Run the script from the command line with php script.php. It will output the pager statistics without affecting the live site.