Joomla CCKs - Our View (Part One)

Over the years that we’ve been developing Joomla sites for our clients, for the most part, have rarely needed any functionality that is SO specific that we cannot achieve it by using the core Joomla 1.5 system plus suitable extensions, whether they be modules, components, plugins or a combination of each.

However we recently had the need to create a site which, although it did not have specific functionality needs, did have specific requirements for the nature of the pages and how they would be displayed/edited. Not to go into too much detail but essentially the site will list books, separated into various categories and possibly subcategories, and with a set of custom “fields” to hold the information on each book – ie ISBN, cover image, Publisher and (most specifically for this site) custom links to affiliate sites.

Although this could have been fairly easily achieved by just getting the site owner to type in the information themselves (deleting links to affiliate programs which they didn’t want to use on a book-by-book basis) we wanted to ensure that the site was as easy as possible for the client to update themselves.  Therefore we decided to look into the various CCK components available for Joomla!

In short, CCK stands for Custom Content Kit and it is a component which allows you to define your own types of content, rather than having to use the default Joomla content editor which only allows you to have certain default fields such as Author, Modified Date and one level of Section/Category.  In this case of this development site we also need other fields such as Publisher, ISBN and various links to the affiliates so what we needed was to use a CCK to first define our content type (ie a book) and then to create as many custom fields as we needed so that the client could easily enter the information into these fields, rather than having to hand-type it all.

We investigated just about every CCK that is currently available for Joomla 1.5 including:

• Zoo


• K2


• FlexiContent


• SOBI 2 and finally


• JSeblod

The main features we, as a design and development agency, were looking for were:

1. The ability to create whatever fields and field types we wanted and as many as we wanted


2. The ability to create custom templates for each type of content so that we can completely customise how each content type looks


3. The ability to then make use of the custom fields which we created in the templates we created, wherever and however we wish.


4. The ability to create as many nested levels of sections/categories as we needed


5. Ease of use for the client to administer this new content

Other features which would be desirable:

1. The ability to make use of the core com_content database table (ie the ones which Joomla normally stores the content for pages in so that it would a) ensure ease of migration to future versions of Joomla and b) allow us to make use of the variety of existing extensions for Joomla which act upon this com_content table.  Put simply if the component uses the core tables for storing the bulk of its content then it means we’ll still be able to easily upgrade Joomla in the future and also use various modules etc to display that content.


2. The ability to extend the various field types which make up the system to add in additional custom types (ie MP3 players)

Each system, we found had its own plusses and minuses and it took us several weeks of installing, uninstalling, configuring and testing to settle on the best one.  So which one did we choose?

Check back soon for part two of this post and find out!