Cental Illinois DMUG Review

Congratulations to the Central Illinois Drupal User Group on their first meet up. It was a great success and thank you for allowing some of us CDMUG members to crash the party and participate in the activities. I thought the location of the event was excellent with plenty of parking, wiFi, a laptop w/projector, food, and tons of Drupal community spirit. Kudos to KarenS the DMUG Organizer for an excellent topic (CCK in D6) and flow of the meeting. With consistent DMUG events of this caliber I know the group will continue to grow and attract new members.

The drive to Normal, IL from downtown Chicago was worth the trip. Karen gave a presentation to group members explaining a much improved CCK functionality with D6.

• Ok for starters CCK breaks out into 3 parts:
  • Field: What form field the Admin wants to add on node

• Widget: Options for the way the data will be input by users for this field

• Formater: How the form is displayed

Some other notes: In Drupal 5 CCK took whatever “title/label” name you gave the field and auto-generated the “field_”name that is used in the database tables. This created an issue for themes b/c later if you wanted to do custom themeing your dev team or sysadmin might have changed the “title/label” name but the “field_”name didn’t change in the DB tables. In Drupal 6, CCK will define this DB table “field_” name from the Admin screen.

Another note to make is the CCK format in D6 will be basically, flat out theme functions. (ie: reduction in lines of code - regarding existing Field Modules) This also means that Field Modules will need a bit of attention to get ported over to D6 - so it might be a tuff upgrade - but it will be a good one. ~A developers upgrade if you will, (not to mention a spankin’ new views for site building)... /me smirk’s

There’s an improvement to the Date settings within CCK as well as handling multiple values.

By handling multiple values I mean expect to see some clever “AhHa” (Add More) buttons for D6. Yes its also Drag and Drop for the users.

For more info including a list of new hooks and functions there is node on d.o - Stay Classy. CCK! ;-)

Some other issues were covered including Schema API, FAPI, Translation, etc. more info on d.o node 177892.

Again, thank you to KarenS for Organizing a educational pow-WOW on Drupal and the CTC for co-sponsoring the event with KarenS. It was a pleasure to meet all who attended. On a side-note, I also had a interesting discussion with bmcmurray on Druplash...drupal-powered Flash!