Examples of Field Types in Craft CMS

As I men­tioned in the last video, Craft CMS pro­vides a bunch of field types as part of the core appli­ca­tion. Some of the field types are spe­cial­ized to Craft CMS func­tion­al­i­ty, like the Assets field or the Matrix field. 

But oth­ers, like Drop­down or Table fields, can be cus­tomized with your data. 

While these are the field types pro­vid­ed by default with Craft CMS, you can also add your own cus­tom field types to han­dle data sit­u­a­tions spe­cif­ic to your site’s imple­men­ta­tion. Most­ly com­mon­ly, you’ll find these cus­tom field types in plugins. 

For exam­ple, on CraftQuest, I use the Videos plu­g­in by Dukt. Videos is a plu­g­in that makes it easy to include videos from third-par­ty sources, like Vimeo or YouTube, and have pro­gram­mat­ic access to the video data. 

This plu­g­in pro­vides a cus­tom field type called Videos, which expos­es the plugin’s func­tion­al­i­ty as a field in your pub­lish layout. 

In the Craft Plu­g­in Store, there’s an entire cat­e­go­ry on Fields. These range from the Redac­tor WYSI­WYG field to the Recipe field for more eas­i­ly for­mat­ting recipe data, and to some­thing as sim­ple as a sin­gle cat­e­go­ry select field. If you want to share a cus­tom field with oth­ers that they can use on their projects, then you do it via a plugin.

How­ev­er, you don’t have to have a plu­g­in to cre­ate a cus­tom field. Some­times a project calls for a spe­cif­ic field that col­lects or retrieves data in a cer­tain way. 

In that case, you would use a mod­ule as the deliv­ery mech­a­nism for the field type. If you haven’t built a mod­ule before, check out my course My First Craft CMS Mod­ule, which will teach you the basics of build­ing a module. 

We’ll also build a sim­ple mod­ule in this course to house our cus­tom field types but I’ll link to the starter mod­ule to focus just on the field type and noth­ing else.

Okay, let’s get started!