General Overview of CCK & Views in Drupal

Here are some rough notes from the Wednesday August 22nd Berkeley Drupal User's Group on CCK and views.

Cck and views together make a very powerful tool for customizing your Drupal site. These two modules will be central to the future of Drupal, so all new Drupal users should familiarize themselves with them.

The following is a rough overview of the presentation by Dimitri:

CCK (http://www.drupal.org/project/cck)

• creating a custom content type
• adding custom fields
• node reference: can relate two content types
• other types of fields also available: computed field, date, email, image, link, etc

Views (http://drupal.org/project/views)

• creating a view
• adding fields
• adding arguments
• displaying as a page vs block
• node reference fields in views
• views bonus pack: (http://drupal.org/project/views_bonus), maintained by Dimitri

Unfortunately, the projector began overheating, so we moved to Q&A.

Q&A

• Q: when to use node reference vs taxonomy
• A: use node reference when you have a need for a content type that's related,
  use taxonomy when the node's relation to the term is boolean
• Q: Can you use views to combine profile data and CCK data?
• A: Yes, in several ways: views on user pages, author info on views pages, etc.
• Q: Does heavy use of views affect performancing?
• A: Yes, but there are ways to optimize Drupal's performance

I left early to return to work, so please update this page if you feel there were more topics covered that might benefit others.