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Just wondering that as a best practices, it it better to have one giant Channel Fields set with multiple Channels showing/hiding the required fields or to have independent smaller Channel Fields sets for each individual Channel? Lets say that there are ten Channels if I do a giant set, it will have about hundred custom fields out of which five will be shared by all Channels and for the rest, each Channel will utilize maybe 10 fields with the rest hidden.

One thing to consider is if you have fields that are required.  You can do a test to confirm if I have this right, but In my experience, if certain fields are labelled as required and you hide them in your publish layout for a channel, you get a “mystery” error when you submit the entry.

For example, if you have one field group to use among two channels called Pets and Friends:
- Pet Name (required)
- Pet Status
- Friend’s Name (required)
- Friend’s Status

And in the publish layout for Pets you have:
- Pet name (required)
- Pet status
- HIDDEN -> Friend’s Name (required)
- HIDDEN -> Friend’s Status

Now, when you submit an entry for a pet, it will throw an error and require Friend’s Name be filled out.

But wait, it’s hidden, you cannot fill it out and don’t even know what the error is for, because—it’s hidden!

So either have no required fields or else break up into multiple smaller field groups (which is what I ended up doing).

If the channels have a large number of custom fields that overlap one another and very few that are distinct then a giant field group can be useful.  If however the fields are entirely different from one channel to the next, and in particular, as the previous responder noted, have differing required field enforcement needs, separate field groups may be more to your advantage.  I personally prefer separating the field groups, because in my particular case, I commonly have a couple of fields in the group that are required AND that need to be presented differently from one channel to the next, and so one larger field group is not always practical for me, base on how I organize content for my clients.

Thanks for the comments. There are about five fields common across all products such as Manufacturer, Price, Images etc. however, all other fields (anywhere between 5-15 for each channel) are different so I guess it makes more sense to have separate groups. Where it becomes painful is when you want to change a field that is common- you end up doing the same thing twelve times for the twelve groups 😊

Do yourself a favor and grab Field Editor add-on by Rob Sanchez.  Not only does it give you a multiple custom field editing experience, when you create a field in one channel, you can clone it into others.

Do yourself a favor and grab Field Editor add-on by Rob Sanchez.  Not only does it give you a multiple custom field editing experience, when you create a field in one channel, you can clone it into others.

Yep- have that already. Makes the process simpler but you still need to delete an entry from 12 different places. Would be awesome if EE could allow channels to select multiple field groups.