CCK – Content Construction Kit and Views

CCK

CCK is one of the very essential modules for Drupal. It’s full name is Content Construction Kit. CCK allows you to create new content types (and extend existing content types).

Drupal comes with content types like web page and blog. For each content type, you can easily ‘create content' and submit a new web page, blog entry, etc. But perhaps your needs do not fit to those models of text simple entries (with eventual attachments, like images).

For instance, if you would like to make a collection of famous quotations, and you want to track the also the author’s name and the source of that quotation (book title, for instance).

Views

Views module works together with CCK. Essentially, Views is a smart query builder for displaying and filtering results. In our example, you want perhaps to filter and display 10 most popular quotations of Winston Churchill (popularity is based on the number of clicks on your web site).

Some other, more obvious uses of Views are:

• You want a way to display a block with the 5 most recent posts of some particular type (News or Blogs, for instance).
• You like your default homepage view, but you want to sort some elements on it differently.
• You want create a monthly archive of your blogs that displays a link in the form of "Month Name, Subject (Number of Posts in Month)"