Custom Fields in Movable Type
Dec 16

Custom Fields in Movable Type

CustomFields: Here’s a plugin for Movable Type that may address some (all?) of my “open vs closed content management” ranting.

CustomFields is a plugin that allows you to define custom fields that will appear on the entry editing screen and author profile screens. This allows you to store far more things about an entry or author for example you can now create complex author profiles.

Now, I’ve complained about custom fields before in general, but this lets the fields be defined per blog. With this, you can do a lot. (And this is a step up from my own user-defined fields hack, since that hack made the fields global to the installation.)

Going back the the “sermons” example I tend to use a lot, you could have a blog called “Sermons” with all the custom fields in there that you need (length, topic, biblical reference, etc). Other blogs store other objects and have other fields.

This plugin has the additional functionality of treating authors as an archive type, so you can create author archives with detailed information and a collection of blog postings about authors. This is long overdue.

by Deane   December 16, 2005 5:14 AM    |   Follow Gadgetopia on Twitter   |  Tags:  Movable Type

Comments

by Darren Chamberlain,   December 16, 2005 7:13 AM  

You might also be interested in the RightFields plugin which does a lot of the same things:

If you use Movable Type to manage content other than a traditional weblog, or if your weblog entries contain specific types of structured data, chances are you've wished for the ability to change the labels of the fields on the entry editing screen, or to make one of them into a menu or checkbox, or to add more fields.

That's what RightFields lets you do. You can change the label and input type of the standard entry fields, and create extra fields. If you have multiple weblogs with different types of content, you can define a separate set of fields for each weblog.

The two plugins are very similar, though. I haven't used either one so I can't make a specific recommendation for or against either. RightFields was discussed on the ProNet list recently.

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