Working with the Drupal Content Construction Kit

Drupal’s content construction kit (CCK) is now a core part of Drupal 7 and allows for easier addition of custom fields within content. At its core, Drupal entries are driven by content which allows you to create text-rich entries ideal for search engines.

When it comes to professional presentation of information, however, you may want to add custom fields for images, media, menus or other presentation aspects. In these cases, CCK provides an easier way to structure the content fields to match your preferences.

There are two basic content entries within Drupal – users can write blog entries or pages. In both of these cases, you can extend the content well beyond the title and body. With the content kit you can add custom fields for nearly any content type, allowing you to integrate media and fields that match your user experience (UX) requirements.

Publishers can add author, issue and related story information, while it’s possible to create custom fields of nearly any type. Common examples of custom fields include data fields which can provide conditional information on relevance, word count and other factors, date information, URL links, ratings and external inputs such as videos or data from external APIs. In fact, you can integrate custom data from kit modules as well.

Understanding Custom Fields in Drupal

Custom fields provide a way to enter unique content into your site on a post-level basis. As a result, Drupal is much more than a standard CMS and offers features which can more fully integrate into a modern web application or publication. While Drupal 6 segmented these through a module, Drupal 7 has core content fields which you can more easily integrate into its structure.

With its API drive structure you can use custom fields for development, design and user experience features.  Since the fields are nodes within the database you can update the access settings through admin, settings, content types. Within these settings you can update permissions for editing and viewing so you can establish a proper structure for publishing content.

There are two basic elements to CCK, including its various fields and widgets, which are used on the presentation side. Now that CCK is part of the core of Drupal there are a growing number of modules available.  Nearly any type of computation, calculation or input method can be easily defined through Drupal modules rather than requiring manual input, especially in the case of common computation or updates.

From the perspective of a database there are three major entries to a custom field, including the content, field and instance (presentation). When you add a unique custom field a new table or sub-table is created so you can populate unique data into the database.

Common examples of unique calculations performed via module include a variety of data collection methods, such as currency conversion, language translate and related content pulled through a custom algorithm. With custom fields you can make the presentation of each article unique, customize its presentation based upon the audience and deliver a unique presentation tailored to your audience.

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