Gadgetopia

RightFields: My goodness, when it rains it pours. I mentioned the other day that I found a plugin that allowed you to do blog-specific custom fields in Movable Type, which is wicked groovy. Things like that keep me from ranting about things like this, which really makes everyone happy.

Well, a commentor on that post (I love it when this happens…) pointed me to RightFields, which seems even better. Painfully better, even.

In addition to the standard form input types, RightFields has a File type that lets you upload a file directly from the entry screen; a Date type that lets you select a year, month, and day from menus; and a powerful Linked entry feature that lets you associate an entry with an entry from another weblog, or a different entry in the same weblog.

Besides the file upload and date field, RightFields will allow you to decide where to store the extra data — either in a generic table for everything, or in a dedicated SQL table, which is handy for querying from other apps or using the MTSQL plugin for goodness knows what.

The ability to link posts is a really nice feature, and a need that every CMS stumbles onto sooner or later. The only thing missing would be allow a post to link to more than one other post, thus emulating many-to-many relationships, which is where things get scary powerful, but I’m totally nitpicking now.

(And, not only did I not know about Custom Fields and RightFields, there was apparently another plugin that did roughly the same thing called ExtraFields. It’s more or less deprecated now, but it just goes to show that I need to keep better track of what’s going on in the Movable Type universe.)