Adding block to show list of recent donations

Question

I have an established open-source software project, and I've been fortunate enough to get donations from users. My website uses Drupal (6.19) and I'd like to add a block that shows a list of recent donations, e.g.:

Thank you for supporting OpenSTV
John Smith $5 12/20/2010
Mary Kay $20 12/5/2010
Ingwe Malmstein $50 11/27/2010

I've never done any custom work in Drupal, but my idea to do this was to:

1. Create a custom content type called Donation that has only a title (did this already)
2. Create a new Donation entry for each donation (did this too)
3. Create a block that shows the 5 most recent donations
4. Have the block appear in the sidebar (know how to do this)

I don't know how to write the php code for 3. Is there a simple example of doing something like this that I could copy from? Or is there entirely different way of doing this that would work better?

I've never written any php code so the simpler the better. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Use the Views module. Here is a quote about it (from its project page):

You need Views if:

• You like the default front page view, but you find you want to sort it differently.
• You like the default taxonomy/term view, but you find you want to sort it differently; for example, alphabetically.
• You use /tracker, but you want to restrict it to posts of a certain type.
• You like the idea of the 'article' module, but it doesn't display articles the way you like.
• You want a way to display a block with the 5 most recent posts of some particular type.
• You want to provide 'unread forum posts'.
• You want a monthly archive similar to the typical Movable Type/Wordpress archives that displays a link to the in the form of "Month, YYYY (X)" where X is the number of posts that month, and displays them in a block. The links lead to a simple list of posts for that month.