This post was inspired by a question our VP Tony asked me while I was working on Entityqueue, he asked, "how is it different from Draggable Views?" At first the answer isn't as obvious, they both allow you to sort items in a list. Draggable Views supports any entity that you can create a View to display. There are a couple key, slight differences that make each one better than the other depending on the use-case and admin experience. In fact, I've used both modules on the same project, depending on the situation.
While I'm promoting Entityqueue in this post, the same arguments should apply to Nodequeue.
Overview of Differences
Entityqueue allows you to create lists, add items to them, and sort them. Draggable Views allows you to sort a list of items.
- Adding items to your list
In Entityqueue, only items added to your queue are in your list. Using Draggable Views all items matching your Filter Criteria are in your list.
- Sorting items
In Draggable Views, once you change the order of one item and save it, all items in your list now have a weight. In Entityqueue only the items in your queue get a weight, allowing you to add additional sort criteria to your view as I talked about in using Entityqueue with Views.
When to Use Draggable Views
Because of those differences, Draggable Views is great when you have a limited number of items to display in your View and you want to control the order of ALL items in the view via drag-and-drop. A common example of when I use Draggable View is Marquee's. Each slide is it's own node, and we are using Views to filter which nodes to display, and we want to control the order of all the slides, so Draggable Views is perfect in this case. Another somewhat common example would be something like the "Our Team" block on our Company page, where we display all members of the team, but want to have full control over where a member shows up. For example, Joaquin, our President and Founder should always be at the top, and while we love our cardboard cut-outs, Han Solo and the Storm Tropper will always be at the bottom.
When to Use Entityqueue
Entityqueue can be better when you are asked to have "Featured" items. When you might think of using the "Sticky at top of lists" checkbox, Entityqueue might be a better option if they want to control which "sticky" item is above another "sticky" item. The most common example I can think of is with Article content. I'm not sure how many times I've built a "Recent News" block that they want to display the most recent news at the top, limited to 5 or so articles. But occasionally they want to have one or two articles at the top, no matter what! If we just used the "sticky" checkbox, then they wouldn't be able to order them.