cck

Here is an example on how to obscure email addresse (or other tekst) using http://drupal.org/project/signwriter in a formatter. You can use it on the cck field overview as a formatter (or in display suite).

A cck fieldgroup can be rendered alone. We had some quicktabs we wanted to fill with our field groups. So we've builded a block for each field group to put in the quicktabs. Here is an example of one block where we called a single fieldgroup and rendered it.

How to add another formatter to a cck field? A cck formatter is basically a theming function where the value of field is ran through. Formatters are available at "admin/content/node-type/[your node type]/display" in the cck interface.

How to load only the content fields of a node to avoid a full node load?

Sometimes in scripts you need information stored in cck fields but you dont want to do full node loads neither do you want to query the table directly because setting a field from single to multiple value would make the table location of that field change.

The standard way of altering form elements and setting them disabled does not work with cck fields.

The FAPI process handler of the CCK field won't transfer the #disabled attribute to its children elements.
You'll need this snippet to make it work.