How do I remove outer/container divs from a view? I have a view which uses "unformatted list" as it's output format.

&lt;div class="view view-featured-causes-view view-id-featured_causes_view view-display-id-block view-dom-id-961c974a51410cb04cdd2a2be4f3c589"&gt;
&lt;div class="view-content"&gt;...&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;


Now I want these divs to be stripped.

I tried the solution in this answer, but I just want to change the format. I do not want to use Semantic views as that does not help at all in my case.

I manually created a views theme (copying unformatted list) and changing its code as:

&lt;?php if (!empty($title)): ?&gt;
  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;?php print $title; ?&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;
&lt;?php endif; ?&gt;
&lt;?php foreach ($rows as $id =&gt; $row): ?&gt;
  &lt;div&lt;?php if ($classes_array[$id]) { print ' class="' . $classes_array[$id] .'"';  } ?&gt;&gt;
    &lt;?php print $row; ?&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
&lt;?php endforeach; ?&gt;


to:

&lt;?php if (!empty($title)): ?&gt;
  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;?php print $title; ?&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;
&lt;?php endif; ?&gt;
&lt;?php foreach ($rows as $id =&gt; $row): ?&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;?php print $row; ?&gt;&lt;div&gt;&lt;div&gt;
&lt;?php endforeach; ?&gt;


but that deeply craps out my overall design.

What is the most appropriate and simplest way to do this?
You should override the views-view.tpl.php, not the views-view-unformatted.tpl.php.

The two divs you mention are originating from sites/all/modules/views/theme/views-view.tpl.php, check out lines 30 and 55.

If you copy this over to your theme's templates folder, and rename to be specific to your page/block display, you can remove that part of the template's code and you should get what you need. 


  cp sites/all/modules/views/theme/views-view.tpl.php 
  sites/all/themes/your_theme/templates/views/views-view--your-ul-page.tpl.php


N.B.: This is exactly what the other post's accepted answer is doing in the first part, before going into Semantic Views configuration, you can ignore that part. Here is a modified/simpler version of the code snippet from that answer, for quick reference:

&lt;div class="&lt;?php print $classes; ?&gt;"&gt;     // 30: delete this line
  &lt;?php print render($title_prefix); ?&gt;
  &lt;?php if ($title): ?&gt;
[...]
&lt;?php if ($rows): ?&gt;
    &lt;div class="view-content"&gt;  // 55: delete this line, 
      &lt;?php print $rows; ?&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;                      // 57: delete this line
  &lt;?php elseif ($empty): ?&gt;
[...]
&lt;/div&gt;&lt;?php /* class view */ ?&gt; // 90: delete the div from this line


Good luck!