Setting Up a Craft CMS Module for a Field Type

We want to focus on build­ing our first field type for this course, so we’ll start with a sim­ple pre-built Craft module. 

We’re going to use the Craft Mod­ule starter mod­ule avail­able on my Github account. Installing it is as sim­ple as fol­low­ing the instruc­tion. Let’s walk through these together.

1. Down­load the mod­ule as a zip file.
2. Unzip the down­loaded file. 
3. Rename to craft-module
4. Place the entire direc­to­ry in the modules direc­to­ry in your Craft project. I’m going to do this in my CraftQuest project.
5. Update the Craft project config/app.php to boot­strap the module. 
6. Update the project’s composer.json file so that the class file is includ­ed in Composer’s autoload files. After that, we’ll need to rebuild the autoload files:

   composer dump-autoload
   

With that done, we should be able to load our site just as before. Our mod­ule doesn’t do any­thing yet, so Craft should just boot­strap it and then con­tin­ue on as nor­mal. No errors is good good news.

Prepar­ing for a Field Type

To pre­pare for our cus­tom fields, let’s cre­ate a fields direc­to­ry inside the mod­ule src direc­to­ry to hold the cus­tom fields code. Sup­pose you’ve fol­lowed along in my oth­er cours­es on extend­ing Craft. In that case, you will rec­og­nize this pat­tern of cre­at­ing direc­to­ries inside the src direc­to­ry for each com­po­nent we are adding to Craft.

craft-module
├── README.md
└── src
    ├── CraftModule.php
    └── fields

Inside the fields direc­to­ry, we will cre­ate a class file for each field type that we want to make. 

In the fol­low­ing video, we’ll work on our first field type for a world lan­guage dropdown.