Drupal 4.7 has an amazing “Content Creation Kit” module available for it (apparently, the module drove much of the node redevelopment between 4.6 and 4.7). It lets you easily create new content types, on the fly, without touching any code. It provides a set of primitives, and you can assemble them however you want - even providing lists of acceptable entries.

This is similar to the Flexinode module that’s been around for awhile now, but Flexinode was apparently a proof-of-concept hack that wasn’t intended to be adopted as widely as it has been, and apparently has scalability issues. CCK is sort of like Flexinode, reloaded. There is even a migration path planned to help folks who are heavily invested in Flexinode to move forward to the “modern” way of doing things.

For a demo project I’m setting up, I just created a new “News Release” CCK content type, with the required “Title” field, a text “Abstract” field, a “More Info” URL, and a “Main Content” field. I could easily add “Release Date”, “Agency” or any other News Release related fields. And, any releases created using the CCK content type would automatically have the appropriate fields and widgets provided.

CCK supports several types of fields:

• date (text field)
• node reference (select list or autocomplete field)
• integer (free entry, select list, or checkboxes)
• decimal (free entry, select list, or checkboxes)
• text (free entry, select list, or checkboxes)
• user reference (select list or autocomplete field)
• web url (text field with URL validation)

When combined with the Views module, you can create pages listing these various CCK content types, displaying whichever fields are appropriate, and providing sorting/filtering tools as desired.

Want to create a Journal Article Review content type? Sure thing! Lesson plan? OK! “Learning Object” reference - maybe even approximating a LOM? Why not? With these primitives available via the web interface (no code required - or even allowed) you should be able to do literally anything… You can even clone/duplicate CCK content types, making it easy to tweak types without breaking existing content.

Seriously cool stuff. Semantically structured content types within Drupal. Kind of like Structured Blogging, but implemented within the structure of the CMS, rather than as a bolted-on xml parsing/generating utility. I’ll be using this on a few projects…

I was bugging Boris with some emails today to ask about Drupal’s support for structured blogging. I was asking if Drupal would be getting something like the WordPress Structured Blogging plugin, which provides templates for authoring various microformats.

It wasn’t until after he responded that I realized how silly my question was. Drupal doesn’t need the plugin, because support for custom formats and authoring templates is baked into the DNA of Drupal. Even for non-coders, anyone can make up new formats (and templates) on the fly using the flexinode module. And several other formats are already available as prepackaged modules (events, reviews, etc…)

So, just a reminder to myself to think about the nature of the solution, and not go looking for something done “the WordPress way” (or matching any other particular implementation - various applications have different concepts behind the scenes, and may approach the same problem from different angles)

Structured Blogging was just updated to version 1.pre13, and one of the changes is apparently a new content type (well, it may have been in 1.pre12 - I skipped a version) that supports a structured review of a journal article.

This could be quite useful in academic blogging. Imagine a spider that crawls the blogs of your students (or of students and professors across the ’sphere), indexing journal article reviews. It could make it very easy to share notes and thoughts on an article, or to create a distributed journal bibliography for communities of practice…

Here’s a screenshot of a mockup journal article review (for a journal that happened to be sitting on my desk):