Fields of dreams: Customizing fields to better support your content

Many Drupal websites contain content that requires storage, data entry, or display that is not natively supported by core or contributed modules—for example a recipe site that requires a multi-value ingredient field with properties for quantity and unit. Drupal’s plugin-based Field API allows developers to easily create new field types, formatters, and widgets to support the specific needs of the site’s content.

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Determine when content has specific storage, data entry, or display requirements that warrant the customization of a field
• Modify and extend existing field plugins to offer custom features through third-party settings
• Define a new base field on an entity type
• Define a new field formatter to customize the rendering of a field’s content
• Define a new field widget to customize the way site users enter content for a field
• Define a new field type, which allows customization of the structure of the content and how the data is stored

Customizing fields to better support your content allows you to:

• Avoid the need to create new entities (using the Paragraphs module, for example) and entity references to allow multiple properties to be assigned to a single field
• Improve the experience of users who enter content
• Simplify how content is stored in the database and reduce the complexity of database queries
• Provide more flexibility when rendering content