CCK Content Type Creation Best Practices
Last modified: December 6, 2006 - 17:27
There are several things to keep in mind when designing CCK content types:
There are several benefits to CCK field types sharing a namespace. One benefit is simulated inheritance of a parent content type. For example, if both the manager and designer content types share a salary field, a view could easily be created that shows the salaries of all designers and managers. Similarly, queries can be written to select all nodes that have an end_date field greater than a certain date.
Thinking out the overall structure of your content types before you design can pay off in several ways. You can decide which fields are semantically equivalent and which fields would be better if kept separate.
Prefixing is a great way to distinguish similar fields.
Best performances?
Howdy,
A question: what is best content type creation practice in terms of performance?
sharing as much field types as possible (keeping relative tables low in number) , or viceversa creating one of them for every content type field?
Any clarification is welcome!
cck is self normalizing....
Each node type created with cck gets a table for all of its unshared field instances. Field instances shared by several node types get their own table. in this way cck has a self normalizing database structure. I think there was some pre-implementation bench marking at drupalcon 2005. I don't know that it has been heavily benchmarked after implementation or with various configurations of custom content types. CCK aggressively caches content type meta data & content. I think JonBob has put a lot of work in minimizing the performance impact of the high level of abstraction.
seeking clarification on the pros & cons of sharing cck fields
I'm still unclear on whether it is best to avoid shared fields. I had assumed that yes, it was best to avoid shared fields, so that all the node's data was stored in the same table. I had assumed this was more efficient. Are you saying that the difference in efficiency is negligible, and is outweighed by other considerations?
references
If you too are seeking clarification, on the question of whether to share fields between cck node types, here are a couple of references I found useful:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/3069
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/an_introduction_to_the_content_construc...