Content Types with CCK

Content types are a way of uploading the kind of material and information you want to Drupal. Drupal comes with two pre-installed content types 'Story' and 'Page'.

As with most things in Drupal there are many ways of extending this out of the box functionality. If you want to add other content types you can use the Content administration tools that come with Drupal. This will normally leave you with only the options to include the Title and Body fields in your content type, which of course is pretty limited in its usefulness.

CCK allows you create your own content types (say Video for example) and then to add different types of fields to content types you create. This is generally regarded as the most useful way of building up your content types. CCK the Content Creation Kit is a set of tools which allows us to do exactly this. It's so useful that it's going to be incorporated in to Drupal core. 

In essense CCK allows you do define what fields needed for a type of content. Below you can see a display of a Video content type, and all the fields that have been created for it.

Getting Started with CCK

We cover how to install modules elsewhere in this manual. To get CCK working make sure you install the CCK download (which is a collection of modules) from here.
http://drupal.org/project/cck

There is a handbook on CCK on the Drupal site which is useful for more in depth information.
http://drupal.org/node/162242

CCK is actually a package of more than one module so after you have extracted it you don't need to enable all the modules. The main one that you can't do without is 'Content' some other ones that you may need to install are

• Node Reference
• User Reference
• Text
• Number
• Options Widget

There are many, many other field modules which you can download and install separately. The problem wth CCK sometimes is that there are too many options and it becomes confusing to work out the best way to approach a solution. Often people running Drupal site reply on personal reccomendations of CCK modules rather than doing all the research and experiments themselves.

If you want a more detailed, hands on approach then you can look at the chapter 'Creating a Video Content Type'.