My rule of thumb for deciding what to post on this blog has been to document anything I've spent more than an hour trying to figure out. Today I've got a good one for anyone trying to create CCK fields as part of a module's installation process.

Back in Drupal 5 the Station module was made up of lot of custom code to track various values like a playlist's date or program's genre and DJs. During the upgrade to Drupal 6 I migrated that data into locked, CCK fields that were created when the module was installed. As people started to install the 6.x version of module I began getting strange bug reports about the Station Schedule that I couldn't seem to replicate on my machine.

I wasted more time that I want to admit do trying to figure this out. I was trying theme a specific CCK field named field_images on all the nodes where it appears. The devel_themer module was listing content-field-field_images.tpl.php as a candidate:

But after copying CCK's content-field.tpl.php into my theme and renaming it I couldn't seem to get the theme to pick it up. Roger López gave me the frustratingly simple answer on irc: "i think you need to have both templates in place"... duh. Copied content-field.tpl.php into my theme and everything worked great.

I spent some time today trying to figure out how to create a CCK field as part of an hook_update_N function. Unlike previous versions of CCK, in 6 it's very easy to manipulate the fields from code.

The first step is to create the field using CCK's UI. Once you've got the field setup the way you'd like it use PHP's var_export() to dump the contents of the node's field as an array:

Back in Drupal 4.7 if you were using CCK for nodes the node body was left empty. In Drupal 5 CCK nodes now can have a body. I wanted to move data from a field named description into the node body so I came up with the following snippet fit for running in the devel module's execute PHP block.