Hi Marc,
an easy way to search CCK fields would be through Views. You can "expose" a filter on those CCK fields that would allow you to search them.
If you want to link to search result pages that contained a specific value in a CCK field you could create the URLs by using the Arguments functionality of Views -- even if it is not quite as clean as the categories functionality of Drupal.
Views with a bit of customisation would allow you to does specific search blocks, etc.
There is a more sophisticated way through CCK Facets and Faceted search that might work in your case but I've never used those myself.
Finally, if it is just a question of certain fields being more suitable as taxonomies/category terms and then write/get someone to write for you a small script that goes through all your nodes and assigns them taxonomy terms based on the value in the CCK field. Then you can use the full power of Drupal's taxonomy system.
Hope this helps,
best,
Ronald
Marc Morris wrote:
Can somebody advise how I can run a conversion from one set of (important) CCK fields into categories which would allow a user to search on movie nodes in groups? I have tried to set up categories but I don't see how I tie them in with CCK nodes.
Basically I've set up a new content type using CCK ("Movie") with numerous fields. There are over 5,000 nodes containing "movie" data.
Some of these fields have keywords which I need to link to and search, but I am unsure how to do this.
I also need to add an advanced search function to search the "movie' cck but again I can only find the standard search block. This search function would allow the selection of a "type" and then user input of the search required in relation to the selected search criteria.
Can anybody help me with this?