Views Query Plugins

While we were building [the new Lullabot site](http://lullabot.com), we decided that we wanted a slideshow of 'bots out and about doing their thing. Kicking ass and having fun at events is a big part of the Lullabot culture, and we wanted to show it off. We thought it would be fun to show a slideshow of the 20 or 30 most recent photos from [the Lullabot team pictures Flickr group](http://www.flickr.com/groups/lullabot-team/) on our Who We Are page, to give a taste of what its like to be a bot. However, we didn't want to import all those photos into our site, wasting storage and duplicating data. Well, you know what they say: the Views module is the cause of, and solution to, all life's problems!

Beginning with Views 3, you can write your own plugin to replace Views' built-in SQL query engine. This means that you can make Views query against any kind of data source. The most common use case is to create Views that query remote web service; that sounded like a great match for our needs, and it's what we're going to explain.