Allow users to edit the list of CCK allowed values for "select list"

Question

I have a CCK field ("City") that is a select list, and has manually entered cities in the allowed values list. I added these cities (as the administrator of the website) but I would like to hand control over to the client.
However, changing their permissions, and allowing them full access to the CCK content types would be potentially disastrous; I need a way to give authenticated users permission to add values to this select list.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

A simple solution would be to use taxonomy.

• Taxonomy has it's own permission system.
• Drupal adds a lot of nice features for taxonomies.
• Categories such as cities is a perfect match for a taxonomy.

Answer 2

There is a module which does exactly this - allows regular users to edit CCK field values. The module is called 'values' (http://drupal.org/project/values).

Answer 3

With CCK I would do the following:

• create a content type "cities" with a "cityname" field

• in the "City" field you defined, I would put some PHP code to populate the "allowed values" textarea:

  $cities = Array();
  $result = db_query("SELECT nid FROM {node} WHERE status = 1 AND type = 'cities'");
  while ($row = db_fetch_array($result)) {
    $node_city = node_load($row['nid']);
    $cities[$node->nid] = $node_city->field_cityname[0]['value'];
  }
  return $cities;
  

A couple of remarks here:

• the code is for D6 but can be adapted quite easily I think.
• you'll have to put in place some validation in the creation of "cityname" to avoid duplicates (maybe also think about a country field).

• it can be quite heavy to load a big number of $node_city, personnaly I'd rather use the tables of CCK to query the value directly, it's a little more complicated but ligther.

  $cities = Array();
  $field = content_fields('field_cityname');
  $db_info = content_database_info($field);
  
  $result = db_query("SELECT n.nid, " . $db_info['columns']['value'] . " AS city
            FROM {node} n 
            INNER JOIN {'. $db_info['table'] . '} c ON c.vid = n.vid
            WHERE status = 1 AND type = 'cities'");
  while ($row = db_fetch_array($result)) {
    $cities[$row['nid']] = $row['city'];
  }
  return $cities;
  

Answer 4

I've created a (sandbox) module that does what you want. I'd just like to reiterate that you might find taxonomy a better fit... but if you do want to continue the CCK route this module might help :)