Brandon Kelly on Custom Fields

Some of you may have noticed by his inquiries on Twitter over the last week that Brandon Kelly was up to something. That something was a past, present and future write-up about custom fields in ExpressionEngine.

In my book, Custom Fields are ExpressionEngine’s strongest feature. They’re right at the core of what defines EE. And they’ve been bustling with innovation lately, from the add-on community as well as EllisLab.

But I don’t think we’ve seen their full potential yet, and I think Field Groups are partly to blame.

Brandon then launches into a history of custom fields (including some great quotes from Mike Boyink, Rick Ellis and Ryan Masuga) and how we go to where we are now: custom fields, organized by groups, which are assigned to a single channel.

The future of custom fields, according to Brandon, is that custom field groups “lose relevance” and the emphasis is put on allowing you to collect different fields into a publish layout. You could pull from any of the fields in the system, freeing you from having to re-create the same fields in different custom field groups.

I’ve been chatting with Brandon about this for several days and I couldn’t agree more. While I do like to organize fields into groups because different channels may need slightly different field settings and instructions (and I reject chaos and embrace order), we shouldn’t tie all fields down into this convention. In fact, there’s almost nothing stopping someone from implementing an idea like this right now. The fields and field groups aren’t bound in the database; you can create any associations you’d like.

Read the whole article (it’s worth it, believe me): Custom Fields and the Death of the Field Group