CCK for wordpress

[dianikol85]

Hi to all!

 

II spent some days reading about Drupal CMS. It's really powerful out of the box. One of its super useful feature is that it came with a CCK module into the core.

 

CCK is an acronym and it means Content Constructor Kit. What it does is that it allows you to create your own content types depending on your needs. For example lets say you need to add a text field in your post that contains a price for a product or you need a checkbox to confirm that this products is in stock etc.

 

Really great feature and i think it's a must.

 

Is there something like that in Wordpress? Do you suggest another way to do the same thing?

 

Thanks

[falkencreative]

Wordpress does have this feature, called "Custom Post Types":

 

http://thinkvitamin.com/code/create-your-first-wordpress-custom-post-type/

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/wordpress/rock-solid-wordpress-3-0-themes-using-custom-post-types/

http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/04/29/custom-post-types-in-wordpress

 

I also did a basic video tutorial on this that is up in the KillerSites Video Library within the Wordpress section. What I have found, however (and I'm not sure how this compares to Drupal) is that this functionality isn't super easy to work with. It requires a lot of manual coding, and there are still parts of the process (especially dealing with multiple custom post types) that I don't fully understand.

 

There are, however, plugins that help automate this process. I'm hoping that as Wordpress evolves something like this will be built into the core files so that creating custom post types requires significantly less hand coding.

 

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-post-type-ui/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-post-template/

 

It's also possible (depending on what you have in mind) that using Wordpress' custom fields feature would work as well (and would be a simpler approach.)

 

http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/wordpress-custom-fields-101-tips-tricks-and-hacks/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/13/10-custom-fields-hacks-for-wordpress/

http://wparena.com/how-to/the-power-of-wordpress-custom-fields/

[dianikol85]

I think it's a must for wordpress. I wish they will add this functionality soon because we don't need only plain text. We need more choices like setting up our checkboxes or drop down lists and maybe we need them to be dynamically created according to the database or something. How do you handle these stuff of requirements in wordpress?

 

I am pretty sure that we need something more textfields.

[falkencreative]

I wish they will add this functionality soon because we don't need only plain text. We need more choices like setting up our checkboxes or drop down lists and maybe we need them to be dynamically created according to the database or something. How do you handle these stuff of requirements in wordpress?

That sort of thing can be done with Wordpress' custom post types. As I said though, it's a bit of a pain to work with at the moment (at least, if you try to hand code this rather than using a plugin) but hopefully it will get better in the future.

 

Wordpress isn't the answer to every project that needs a way to manage content. Depending on the needs of the project, you may be much better off with Joomla, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, etc. -- something that was built as a CMS first, rather than Wordpress, which was built as a blog engine first, and then added to later so it could handle more CMS related tasks.

[dianikol85]

Sure but it is a lot time consuming to master 2 CMSes.