JAB17 - Joomla 3.7 Custom Fields - Using Them to Their Full Potential
Channel: J and Beyond e.V.
Date: 04/06/2017

by Geraint Edwards

Joomla 3.7 introduces a very welcome new feature, Custom Fields for the core content types. Out of the box you can add custom fields to Content, Contacts, Users and 3rd party addons can add support too.

For many sites, simple Joomla content items don’t offer enough flexibility to meet the website owner’s requirements. 
An estate agency/realtor’s site will need energy or survey reports, floorplans, pricing, broadband availability, address information, school catchment etc.
A cookery website will need recipes with lists of ingredients, preparation instructions, nutritional information etc. 
Clubs and societies need additional information about their users - membership numbers, qualifications etc.
Etc.

There are many addons to Joomla, sometimes known as CCKs or Directories, that allow you to create structured content for your website. It is also possible to create have user profile plugins to extend user data. But most of these are often complex to manage, unintuitive and become expensive to maintain and users often yearn for the simplicity of Joomla content items. With the release of Joomla 3.7 many site developers will be able to use Joomla Custom Fields to meet their requirements without the need to use complex CCKs and user profile plugins.

In this talk we will show you how Joomla 3.7 custom fields work - creating fields in Joomla content, contacts and user profiles. We will show you how you can setup different fields for different content types and customise the output using template overrides.

We will then introduce a new tool to make managing Joomla custom fields easier and more powerful. 
Making it easier to create customise content creation and output that varies by content types (e.g. recipes vs chefs)
Allowing the output of fields to be conditional on the value of others
Allowing you to customise list views (such as the featured articles) differently to individual articles
Allowing you to filter menu item output by custom field values
All of this whilst continuing the use the core Joomla custom fields.