One of the cool new things in Drupal 7 is the ability to easily add new “View modes” for nodes. View modes are available for other entities like comments also, but I’m gonna only cover the nodes for this time. 

Before, Drupal had only two “hard-coded” node view modes, the full node view and the teaser view. These two provided us just enough flexibility for most simple content listings, but quite often we needed to turn to Views in Fields mode to get more flexibility. By flexibility in this case I mean displaying the same content in different ways in different contexts.