Drupal Learning Journal 4. “Using Drupal” – Chapter 3 – Job board

The third chapter of “Using Drupal” covered the CCK and Views modules, which I played with quite a bit in the last two weeks, so there weren’t any major learning points here for me. Here are the minor ones though:

• Both CCK and Taxonomy can create select lists. The differences (page 96):
  – Taxonomies are for categories. Nevver make a CCK field called category.
  – Taxonomies can have hierarchies of categories. If you need a tree use this.
  – Taxonomies only have title and description fields. If you need more, use CCK
  – If you can remove the field and the content type still makes sense, use Taxonomy. E.g. an article without a “technology” category is still an article.
• Lack of italics (in Views creation/modification) indicates that a setting is being overridden. (page 116)
• You can have “%” in path names of views and the % will be replaced with the argument. (page 141)
• Potentially useful modules to extend CCK/Views (page 147):
  – Automatic Node Titles: “allows hiding of the content title field in the form. To prevent empty content title fields one can configure it to generate the title by a given pattern.” (version for Drupal 7 is in alpha right now)
  – Custom Links: “Allows administrators to set up parameterized entries for any node type’s links. This allows CCK-style node types to have “Visit this user’s blog” style links, without any custom code.” (seems to have been abandoned two+ years ago)
  – Content Permissions: (part of CCK) can hide fields depending on the viewing user’s role.