In Drupal 5.x or Drupal 6.x, you have the ability to create as many types of content as you like. The Content Construction Kit builds on this feature by allowing you to add custom fields to those content types. If you use the Views module, CCK also makes all your custom fields available to any View.

Install CCK the same way other modules are installed, download and unzip the tarball from http://drupal.org/project/cck and add it to the sites/all/modules folder within your site (create that folder if you don't have it already), then go to the example.com/admin/build/modules page of your site to activate the new module(s). For detailed module installation instructions, see the official page at http://drupal.org/node/70151

CCK is actually a group of modules. The primary module is called 'Content' and it is required in order to use any other CCK modules. The tarball includes a few other modules, which comprise the 'Core CCK' modules. They include:

  • Text
  • Number
  • Nodereference
  • Userreference
  • Optionwidgets
  • Fieldgroup

Please note that you need at least one of those enabled in order to see the 'New Field' option when managing the fields of a Content Type.

There are many additional CCK modules that allow the creation of all sorts of really cool custom fields such as money, time, date, email address, etc., and they're listed on the CCK modules download page. Once you are familiar with the basic CCK system, you should download and install a few specialty CCK modules from the above listed page and try them out.