Getting an Index View

You actually can do this. Add your title field to the view twice. Set one of them to 'exclude' and make it the grouping field. Then add a theme template for that field and use PHP code (specifically the substr function) to reduce the title to just one character. See the Theme: Information link in the View plus the associated help for information on theming an individual field.

merlinofchaos, I'm trying to follow your instructions above to create a glossary type page which indexes a Node content type and groups based on first character of the Node title.

I've created a duplicate field for the Title with id title_1 and created a theme file named views-view-field--TOC--title-1.tpl.php (didn't know which of the several name options I should have used). The template file started out with a php block of "print $output;" which shows the content in the original groups, and I found that if I substituted 'print "hello";' in the php block I did see the content cluster into one group.

However I'm not yet familiar enough with Drupal's object model to know what I need to do to reduce the title to just one character. I tried '$title = substr($title, 0, 1);', but that shows 'TitleGrp:' as the group title instead of the first char of the actual title - TitleGrp is the label I gave to the duplicate title field. Can you help me fill in the correct variable to feed into the substr to get the correct result?

You're on the right track with the substr, but you should be doing it on the $output in the template for the field that you've got set to 'exclude' and are grouping on.

I thought the $output contained the final rendered version which would include the field label, so I was guessing that I should use the data that was used to build up the $output in the first place and then print that.

$output does not include the field label, that is printed separately.