My current project is a fairly interesting CCK based site with a lot of node referencing going on. It’s core is basically a normalized structure of three different node types. (books, authors, and publishers) All content produced on the website is relevant to one of those three things.
I’ve recently run into a head banger style problem with it though. The need to be able to simplify the input procedure for the users. Since this is mainly reference data for existing stories, we really need to be able to automagically generate many nodes here…
The idea that keeps popping into mind is node types as fields for cck. The concept is an expansion on node reference. Where we embed an entire node form, where we would expect a single field as say a field group… Using #tree it seems like it would be fairly simple just to append node_form() to the cck form array, and process it appropriately.
The next step to creating a usable UI from this… or at least for my use case would be to write a custom widget module for book nodes… Something that takes an ISBN, queries data from an external service and creates the necessary nodes in the background.
And stores the nid locally. The problem is widget_info doesn’t receive any context about the field… So to extend the widget set for node_reference fields where allowed node types is only books would be impossible at this juncture.