CCK & Views the ultimate combination - part 1

Drupal is a fantastic content management system but is perhaps not the most non developer friendly however 3 simple modules can help you create compelling and powerful web site. So in this 3 part mini series lets see how easy it is to develop new content types and ways to view it. To help us lets use a fictitious company called AA Design who are about to start teaching a range of courses.

Quick note this post refers to Drupal 4.7 however several of these modules are now available for Drupal 5

Content Construction Kit

The Content Construction Kit allows you create content types through the web. A content type is a collection of fields. The intent of the CCK is to make the creation of custom node types easier

Lets use the following example we want to create a new node (page) type called courses each page will list a course on offer, for each course we will want a title, description, duration and cost.

To start with download and install the module CCK from drupal.org, install it in the usual way for more information see this post.

Once installed go to administer/content/content types and add content type this takes you to a form to set up information about the content type

The form is self explanatory but just to help here is some quick hints.

• Label - This is the title of the type of content its the name that appears in add content section, just like page or story
• Description - This is the description that appears next to the above label
• Help text, this appears at the top of the data entry page for the content to help the author to understand what to put.
• Title - This is the title or heading of a node if unsure leave blank.

For our example we are going to use the following

• Label - Courses
• Description - Information on courses on offer
• Help - Please complete the following form detailing your course that you wish to offer
• Title - title

After saving we are taken back to the same form but with a couple of additional tabs at the top so lets add some fields by selecting add fields again this form is self explanatory you select your data type and give it a name we will add the following fields note there are 2 pages to each form

• Description - Text/text field, required, Select 4 rows second page.
• Duration - Text/Text field, required
• cost -Number/text field, required

once you have done this you need to set the access control to allow your authors to use the new content type administer/access control you will find the permissions under content.

If you now go to create content you will find your new content type courses.

That’s it for part 1 of this mini series the second part deals with setting up some views.

Other articles in the series
CCK & Views the ultimate combination - part2
CCK & Views the ultimate combination -part 3
HReview a CCK example using contemplate

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