Defining data for your website is akin to gardening at home - difficult to get going (unless you love getting your hands dirty), watching it happen seems about as interesting as watching grass grow, but being involved in it - actually getting in there and digging out the weeds and planting that neat little patch you wanted - spurs you on to greater and greater successes. Thing is, it helps to have a little to work with in the first place.
Gardener's block
That's the price of complete freedom - more room to move, but a whole lot of dirt to get dirty with. Still, what potential! You can do anything with that!
Such was the opening session I had with a customer taking them through our implementation of Jentla CCK (Content Construction Kit), which provides a whole lot of potential for defining and presenting the data your enterprise needs in new content types - even creating some complex workflows along the way. In its most basic form, CCK allows you to create new content types for your websites that expand on the standard Joomla article structure - event listings, directory entries, competition forms - and with a few specialised actions goes all the way through to acting as a sophisticated yet flexible CMDB.
But starting from scratch comes at the price of having to do a bit of introspection first. It forces people to ask the hard questions. What data do you really need? How will it play nicely with your publishing workflow for the site? What do you want that garden of yours to look like?
First up, it really pays to turn the soil over, pick out the weeds and freshen it up before you put anything in it - you might have found your previous site/CMS stores a whole lot of metadata and content types you didn't end up needing that just created an unnecessary burden for your employees. Moving to a flexible CMS that enhances your data with CCK fields affords you the opportunity to sit back, take stock of your business and audience and determine what content types you really need for your website.
Jentla CCK allows you to define fields of a particular field type and associate them to a "field group", which is in turn associated to a Jentla category. Multiple field groups can be linked to a category, so if you have some standard data types across your site content, you can associate the common ones to all categories without having to duplicate it out. So instead of scattering your vegetables throughout the garden, replanting a dozen times or more, you can just go to the one patch if you need to add to your harvest.
Default values for CCK fields can be set at the field level or at an article level, meaning you can create multiple articles from the same data types but change the values depending on what you need to use the data type for. Continuing our garden theme, this can be ultra-handy for, say, a "botanical name" text area, that could potentially benefit from flowing in a different default genus for specific categories of plants. But any taxonomy in need of a mix of general and category-dependent content fields will benefit.
Create a CCK field and include it in a few different article templates to act as submission forms for website content, and you can change the default value of the field to be whatever you need across multiple categories - so someone submitting an article for your site from a front-end CCK-created form already has a headstart on filling in fields that are vital to your content, but contributers shouldn't have to think about. When this is combined with Jentla's extended access control for granting users view and edit permissions to CCK fields it starts to become a powerful tool to ensure the right people are contributing the right data in the right way to the right categories on your website.
No more nasty unformatted, unstructured data and a website that's coming up roses!
Rosy outlook
In the case of the customer mentioned above, we are working on reviewing all data types required, throwing away what hasn't been required with their previous CMS implementation and looking to the future on what data types will be needed before we thrash out the submission forms and article templates.
It's been suggested this could all be made a whole lot easier by going a step further and having a default library of CCK fields and CCK field groups to choose from in a fresh Jentla installation - say an Events group with day/time, title, description, image attachment and other fields common to an event list - and this is a fantastic idea we will look at implementing in a future release to make establishing and tending your growing data garden that much easier.
CCK makes Joomla a more complete package for enterprise and at Jentla, that's what we are all about. There will be further pieces of Jentla functionality transferred to CCK field types as development progresses and our valued customers drive us further in this space. Look for further updates on the direction we are taking CCK soon.
