Flexifield

Content Construction Kit (CCK) · Modules

effulgentsia - August 4, 2008 - 06:19

CCK on Drupal 6 is awesome. You can create multi-valued fields, and re-order the field items with drag-and-drop. However, each item in the field is constrained to be of the same type (e.g., text, date, etc.), and creating a new type requires coding by a developer.

Flexifield tries to get around both limitations by letting you create combinations of fields and then use that combination as items within a larger field. You define a field combination by creating a node type and adding fields to it. On a different node type, you can add a flexifield, and then on its configuration form, specify which node types to use as items within the field.

Note about views integration: Please see this issue. It doesn't exist yet, but I'm working on it.

Road map: See this issue.

Integration with other modules:

This module has a dependency on the ahah_response module.
Alpha 3 of this module requires CCK 2.2 or later.
If you use the Wysiwyg API module on textarea fields, and you need the "add another item" or drag-and-drop features of CCK to work for those textarea fields, you will need the Wysiwyg API CCK Integration module. You may be interested in these modules even if you're not using flexifield, but simply want wysiwyg editors to work on regular multi-valued textarea fields.
If you set a flexifield field to use multiple content types for its items, and if one or more of the fields within one of those content types requires javascript or css files to be loaded for the widget (field editing form) to function (the filefield module is an example), you will need the ahah_script_ensurer and ahah_style_ensurer modules.
With alpha 3 of this module, you can use file fields within a flexifield. However, you need to wait until version 3.1 of the filefield module is released, or else use the dev snapshot of it until version 3.1 is released. Also, you will need to enable the "FlexiField FileField Integration" module (included with the download of flexifield).

General caution about using pre-release modules: I'm very grateful for everyone who's been using the alpha versions of the flexifield module, and participating in the issue queue. Without your continued support doing that, this module will never make it to a stable 1.0 state. At the same time, I want to make sure to warn people thinking of using this module that alpha means this module is still in heavy development, and has not yet been widely tested. It is in-use on several live websites, but consider this warning carefully before using it on your own website.