CCK Fields, Teasers, etc - my solution

After tearing my hair out trying to do a block with titles and teasers from a CCK custom content type using Views, and seeing that other people were having trouble, I sat down with phpMyAdmin, used var_dump($whatever) in the appropriate place and figured out something that worked for me. Maybe it will help you ...

Teaser lists in Views don't work. You get the whole text. It's a bug, somewhere. However, the teaser you want is there in $node->teaser but Views doesn't seem to be able to reference it. There's Node: Body, but no Node: Teaser and Excerpt doesn't seem to work with CCK/Views either (besides, why should I do the work ...).

The custom fields you create are also there but buried two layers down in an array, in the "value" element of an array that is in the 0th element of a top level array. A complication is that all your custom defined fields are given the equivalent of a table prefix with "field_" prepended and are truncated to 31 characters overall (i.e. including the field_ bit). If you want to use the image custom content type, it gets even more complicated ...

So, in coding up a block to do title, teaser and image and a couple of custom fields from a CCK content type, here's what worked for me. My custom content type is called News Editorial, which CCK then referes to as "content_news_editorial" (note how it converts to lower case and puts in underscores for you - and without telling you). My custom fields are called "Editorial Author", "Editorial Author Picture", "Editorial Author Job Title", "Editorial Author Organisation" and "Editorial Content".
The resulting fields in CCK are "field_editorial_author", "field_editorial_author_picture", "field_editorial_author_job_titl", "field_editorial_author_organisa", and "field_editorial_content" (note the truncations)
Here's the code for the block which may help you as an example to get going:

<?php
  /*
   * Get Latest News Editorial
   * ASH, 2006-09-26
   * (Can be used an general example for CCK content)
   */

  $content_type = 'content_news_editorial';
  $limit = 5;

  global $base_url;
  $result1 = db_query(db_rewrite_sql("SELECT n.nid, n.created FROM {node} n WHERE n.type = '$content_type' AND n.status = 1 ORDER BY n.created DESC LIMIT $limit"));
  while ($node = db_fetch_object($result1)) {
     $node_loaded = node_load($node->nid);

     $output .= '<strong><a href="' . $base_url . '/?q=node/' . $node->nid . '">' . $node_loaded->title . '</strong></a>';
     $output .= '<p>&nbsp;<br>';

     $output .= '<img src="' . $base_url . '/' . $node_loaded->field_editorial_author_picture[0][filepath] . '">';
     $output .= '<br><strong>';
     $output .= $node_loaded->field_editorial_author[0][value];
     $output .= '</strong><br>';
     $output .= '<em>';
     $output .= $node_loaded->field_editorial_author_job_titl[0][value];
     $output .= ',<br>';
     $output .= $node_loaded->field_editorial_author_organisa[0][value];
     $output .= '</em><p>'; 

     $output .= '<div class="content">' . $node_loaded->teaser . '</div>';
     $output .= '<div class="more-link"><a href="' . $base_url . '/?q=node/' . $node->nid . '">More...</a></div>';
  }
print $output;
?>