Adam Gregory

Long time users of Drupal will be familiar with Fields already, albeit under a different name, CCK. New users of Drupal though will be soon discover their power for creating complex and highly custom content management systems. But even though Fields are a descendent of CCK they offer much more out of the box then CCK ever did in the past. Let’s take a look at some of those features.

1. Core API

Obviously the fact that they are in Core is a big deal, but what does this really mean? For one it means that Drupal is now more accessible to the masses. I remember the days when I first started out using Drupal and no clue what CCK was or how to use it. It took a lot of time before I really wrapped my head around it. With Fields now being included in Core new users will begin learning how to leverage the power of Drupal right of the bat. Now if only we could get Views included.

2. Fields are for more then just content

In Drupal 6 CCK was powerful it what it offered to create highly customizable content types, but it was limited to only nodes. Not so with the new Fields API. You can now add Fields to Users, Taxonomy, and Nodes. This opens up the door for much more customization then was previously available. A great example of this is user profiles: in Drupal 6 it required some modules and a lot of pain to get a good user profile solution. Drupal 7 can make this process simplified and smooth using Fields on users and Views for displaying them.

3. Fields API is robust

For developers the Filed API offers a robust framework for making custom elements “fieldable.” It also provides a lot of useful features for accessing fields and field data from the backend of Drupal. All in all Fields are one of the biggest improvements in Drupal 7. There are still more though and we will continue to take a look at them in the next few posts.