Sorting out Joomla DB before moving to a CCK

Since the release of Seblod CCK (GA) I have been playing around with it on a personal website.

I am generally very impressed with what they are doing, though I am concerned that some of their approach (especially with regards to templates) maybe unnecessarily complicated. 

In using it, the one thing that has occured to me is that before you even start with a CCK are the existing fields in the Joomla default database complete enough? In this case I am thinking primarily about #_content.

In setting up my personal Seblod based site, I have first of all added to #_content (using seblod) some pretty obvious fields that probably should have been there in the first place:

• Content Summary/Excerpt - for blog listings when you want a defined lead for the article rather than just a portion from the front - much better editorially
• Content Notes - Unpublished notes that should be kept with the article. References, raw interviews, links and so forth.
• Content Image - a main image that is used for things like blog listings, RSS feeds and any specialised template needs.
• Content Sidebar and/or Content Footer - additional information related to the article that needs to be hand written rather than created automatically.

There are other things that would be useful as standard features:

• Content History with notes - Automatic history such as Image added, fulltext edited, Summary deleted and so on, plus the ability to add notes to any of those.
• Media List - an automatically generated list of all media added to the content and their locations (external and internal). This sort of thing is vital if you are keeping a proper media library (which does not exist in Joomla at all yet) where all stored media not only has full notes attached, but can be grouped by permission, user, associated category and article/content.

A CCK (whether that is Seblod or any other system) should be versatile enough to use either new DB tables, but should also have enough core tables available so that all content has a solid starting point. 

It seems perhaps a little unfair that a CCK should not only be used for creating unique database tables and entries but also to create core fields in existing tables that should have been there in the first place! :)

A note about Storage

Many CCKs (Seblod included) use custom methods to store multiple fileds in single existing joomla columns. As a non-programmer my gut instinct is that this is very unwise. 

One issue that has been growing in recent years is about archiving of data in a form that will be accessible over a long period of time. We already have a problem that to allow writers lots of flexibility in presenting their work we store text wrapped up in HTML. To me, adding to that complication by encouraging the use of delimiters to store multiple information types in one field, or adding anything unexpected to any field in a database, is storing up trouble for the future.

My worry is that if I create a large website using one CCK system, then in the future need to convert the data to another system, it may be more or less impossible to sort out all the various problems.

With Seblod, thankfully, you can force it to create new tables where the information is stored in standard form without delimiters and I recommend this method to any who use the system. However, it still used the #_content table for core values like Title, Published Date and so on and joins the information by storing the CCK id number in the introtext and fulltext columns, which to me is a possible problem in the future. 

Post Script

Someone has noticed this on the Joomla Code website:

http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/scmsvn/?action=ScmCommitDet...

It seems that Mark Dexter has set up a Seblod branch of Joomla. No idea why.