Generate CCK field type data

A little birdie told me that some major overhauls are in the works. Keep your ears open for the beginning of March.

Looks like dmitri has gotten bored by the current version of install profiles :P

It looks like Sacha Chua has figured this out, we need to add it to crud.inc before enabling in Profile Wizard. See http://sachachua.com/wp/2008/06/12/programmatically-creating-cck-nodes-i... for discussion.

This is a function I built after reading Sacha's blog post and the one on Civic Actions she refers to. It takes an array as exported by content_copy and creates a new content type from it.

function install_content_copy_create($content) {
  include_once drupal_get_path('module', 'node') .'/content_types.inc';
  include_once drupal_get_path('module', 'content') .'/content_admin.inc';
  $macro = '$content[type] = '. var_export($content['type'], TRUE) .';';
  if (isset($content['fields'])) {
    $macro .= '$content[fields] = '. var_export($content['fields'], TRUE) .';';
  }
  drupal_execute('content_copy_import_form', array('type_name' => '<create>', 'macro' => $macro));
  content_clear_type_cache();
}

Using it on the second installation profile today. Works fine so far. Could use a if (module_exists('content_copy')) {} for better error handling. Does not support tacking on fields to existing content types - thought it wasn't necessary for building from scratch, I might be wrong though.

Will report back how it goes.

After some more work we came across a good use case for adding fields to existing content types: adding fields to content types defined by modules such as blog module. Here is the updated function we're using:

/**
 * @param array $content
 *   associative array as exported by content_copy module.
 * @param string $type_name 
 *   If given updates an existing content type rather than creating a new one.
 */
function install_content_copy_save($content, $type_name = NULL) {
  if (!module_exists('content_copy')) {
    drupal_set_message(t('install_content_copy_save() requires content_copy module (part of CCK).'), 'error');
  }
  include_once drupal_get_path('module', 'node') .'/content_types.inc';
  include_once drupal_get_path('module', 'content') .'/content_admin.inc';
  if ($type_name) {
    // When updating, content_copy form does not update type information
    // of content type, it only adds new fields (updates existing fields?).
    // save content type information seperately.
    $type = (object) _node_type_set_defaults($content['type']);
    node_type_save($type);
  } 
  else {
    $type_name = '<create>';
  }
  $macro = '$content[type] = '. var_export($content['type'], TRUE) .';';
  if (isset($content['fields'])) {
    $macro .= '$content[fields] = '. var_export($content['fields'], TRUE) .';';
  }
  drupal_execute('content_copy_import_form', array('type_name' => $type_name, 'macro' => $macro));
  content_clear_type_cache();
}

I can roll this into a patch if interested.

Changing this to newest branch. Should go into content.inc file in contrib folder. Please do roll a patch if it makes sense here.

The use case definitely makes sense for any module that creates node types.

I referenced this issue here: #72509: Expose a "Save content type" action.

I believe this is resolved with the contrib/content_copy.inc. Re-open if I'm missing something.