One of the most significant accomplishments in Drupal's contributed modules lately has to be Views version 2 for Drupal 6. Already a very popular module before with its first version, Views 2 now has many more features and a brand new UI.
http://drupal.org/project/views
Drupal Tags:
A new way to orgainize views. Especially when your Drupal site gets complex, the list of views that are created can become unwieldy. Views 2 intruduces Tags which help filter the list of views by category and custom tags so you don't need to filter through them manually page by page. It's a huge help in finding the view you need to edit or clone for a particular purpose.
Display Tabs:
Views 2 now lets you configure multiple pages and blocks. These multiple states are set with display tabs. A default tab is present for traits that are shared and other settings can be on other tabs that are completely independent. Depending on your needs, you may have several views pages combined into a single view. You can also set up blocks from a view which use completely different traits. In practice, you'd probably keep only one page, maybe a feed and a block or two for each view. But, there's a lot more flexibility. You could save completely different queries and settings all within different display tabs for a single view.
Ajax UI:
This may be the most significant change of all. The new UI takes some getting used to -- but once you have experience using it for a bit, it's much easier than the original Views UI. The most exciting change is the way updates can be "saved" into the config for a preview below, without truely being saved to the database. I think it's a huge time-saver. You can make an unlimited number of changes to the view, preview it below, and decide you'd like to revert to the view before you began.
Preview:
As I've mentioned, there's an extremely useful feature for previewing changes to your view. Not only that, Views 2 displays the raw SQL code used in it's query. It's easy to preview with Url arguments and you can click within the preview from summary formats and node links. Then, once everything is working the way you want, you can save it to the database.
Otherwise, there are some other changes to the "View Type" - now called a "Style" within Basic Settings - with an additional "Unformatted" setting so the class tags can be kept to a minimum. I'm used to the way Views 1 formatted results into Lists and Tables - so I've tended to keep using those, though I'm sure other Styles could be very helpful depending on the application.
Views 2 is a significant change in the way Drupal developers interact with database queries. It's efficient, helpful, and powerful -- and yet, for old-school Views users, it can be extremely unfamiliar. If you dive in and spend a bit of time tinkering with it, you can quickly find all of the advantages of the Views 2 interface. And once you subdue any fears of using it, developers will quickly find it's usefulness and powerful advantages!
Please add comments or questions below about Views 2.
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