Start With CCK and Views

People who are new to Drupal are always asking "What are your must-have modules?" Everyone has their own answer, but as many times as I have heard this question asked, two modules always remain. VIEWS and CCK.

CCK - CCK stands for Content Construction Kit. It is used to make different kinds of content! This explanation is alwyas followed by an example. So here it comes. For example, you would like Blog Entries on your site. You would need a way to control your blog entries in a different way then a regular page on your site. So, a blog entry would be a different type of content. Another example would be if you wanted to add products, or tips. This system allows you to create fields for each type of content, and this makes it easy to customize different pieces of information.

I am using two content types on this site for the two different tips - Drupal Tips, and Theming Tips. There are other ways of doing this, like creating a tagging system that would organize the information, but I find it easier to create the custom content types so if I wanted to make one a little different, I could. I may want to add a Link field to Drupal Tips, but not Theming Tips. I might want to put an image field in the Theming Tips instead.

Views - The views module makes database queries and creates a user interface for doing this. For those who may not know the web-jargon of queries, I will attempt an different way to say it. A view in Drupal is a list of a certain type of content. Using the interface, you can control how that content is displayed. For instance, you can view the content in a table, or as a list. You can also control what fields are displayed. You could display the Title field, maybe an image field, and a teaser field. You could also add such functionality as making the image link to the full piece of content.

So as you can see, Views and CCK are closely related. CCK can create the different content types and different fields. VIews can help you display those content types in the way that you want it to be displayed. This is a very valuable part of utilizing the Drupal CMS. There has also been a lot of talk of making these two modules a part of Drupal Core (basically means they would be a part of the basic Drupal install).

One of the best pieces of information I have heard for newbies in Drupal was to ONLY install Views and CCK. Get those two modules installed, play around with them, and get comfortable. This way you will start to see how powerful these modules are. You will also get a better idea of what modules you would want to use to expand this functionality and not end up installing a hundred modules that you aren't quite sure how to use.

START WITH VIEWS AND CCK

Happy Drupaling!