Can't work a view, how to bypass it and code it in php instead

Question

I'm new to drupal, and having a tough time getting a view to work (see this question).

Since I can't figure out how to do this with Views, and since getting this done in code is usually a piece of code, is there a way I could bypass the Views UI interface entirely and set the view with normal MySQL code?

Answer 1

You might try this module: http://drupal.org/project/qviews

Answer 2

hook_views_query_alterallows you to alter the query run by views. db_query is how you do custom queries, though Drupal's database structure isn't fixed, so you should look at something like this article if you're going to do that. I think your original question has a simpler solution, though, which I'll leave there.