Here we go with another good reason for using DruPal over other CMS systems and blogging tools

Today:

Two ways of implementing new content types in Drupal

Custom node type implementation

like in many other CMS systems it is possible to implement own modules and own nodes types.

An own module could access a multitude of sources and display ANY data.

A custom node type could access the Drupal nodes and combine that with custom data.

but the real hit is metadata-controlled data modelling.

Metadata controlled data modelling in Drupal

Until Drupal 4.6 using the FlexiNode module in combination with additional tools like FlexiMax for theming the content one could create flexibe data rows with a free definable set of column data… WITHOUT creating ANY additional code or database structure

From Drupal 4.7 the new state-of-the art Content construction kit in combination with the recently released Category Module a lot of new and flexible feature for creating content types and modelling the whole site were introduced. A lot of great new ideas and thoughts went into "Category" as a merge between the famous Drupal taxonomy module and the even more famous Drupal book module.

The goal is to allow not only an arbitrary number of content types to be designed and loaded at runtime, but also a very flexible content styling – image a corporate website combined from static and totally dynamic content – all running on drupal – including an ecommerce shop, support forums and intranet product database functions…

Content Templates* – just created two weeks ago (May 16!) and implemented in the module ConTemplate shall support the *CCK by adding a "template" tab to CCK content-type editing pages and pre-populating the templates with CCK's default layout.

This will make it easy to rearrange fields, output different fields for teaser and body, remove the field title headers, output fields wrapped for use with tabs.module (part of JSTools), or anything you need…. directly from the Drupal admin… no coding!

Content Template can actually be used on any node type and allows modification of the teaser and body properties before they go out in an RSS feed or are handed off to the theme… so this is the next step to a complete dynamicly configured config management system.

I can even think of content-types to be created at runtime – i.e. for a specific product data file import … the only trade-off for all this flexibility is performance.

I wouldn't load 1 million records with Flexinode or CCK either… altough a test of the much more advance CCK with that volume might be a good idea.