For CCK i18n compatibility, internal field names are a must

After hearing the lullabot podcast 38 (which deprecates almost everything except CCK & Views) and reading about the CCK database architecture, I strongy recommend adding internal field names - they are greatly missing for non-English CCK fields. Without them, all fields names look like underscores.

Details

Currently, for each content type you must define a a machine readable name. This is great! since it serves as a part of the table name created for that content type.

Problem is no such concept exist for the field names.

Suggestion: Carry this excellent contcept to the field level! Allow the user to define a machine readable name for each field as well.

Otherwise, when I define my Hebrew field names for my new content type, and look at the DB table, all I get is underscores, which is not very friendly. Field names are *completely* erased, which was not the original intention.

Here is how my 'directory' CCK table looks: Excellent internal name for the table, but only underscores for the field names.

Fixing it will be a great improvement to the CCK data model and will enable easier internationalization.

mysql> desc content_type_directory;
+------------------------+------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+------------------------+------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| vid | int(10) unsigned | | PRI | 0 | |
| nid | int(10) unsigned | | | 0 | |
| field___url | varchar(255) | | | | |
| field___title | varchar(255) | | | | |
| field___attributes | mediumtext | | | | |
| field__page_rank_value | int(11) | YES | | NULL | |
| field___0_url | varchar(255) | | | | |
| field___0_title | varchar(255) | | | | |
| field___0_attributes | mediumtext | | | | |
| field___1_value | int(11) | YES | | NULL | |
| field___4_value | longtext | | | | |
+------------------------+------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
11 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Thanks

Amnon
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