Grouping of Custom Fields
Development and Programming
Preamble: Not content with merely rearranging custom fields in an entry publishing view, I’d long wanted a way to group them together – akin to a “fieldset” in a traditional form. Then, a colleague of mine suggested that that’s the whole point of the tabs at the top: publish, options, date, etc. (I’d previously put everything one single “publish” view). It was like a whole world opened up! Which leads me to…
Quick question: is there a way to access the meta data of a custom field in a template? That is, if I’ve grouped them together in the control panel, and assigned the view to a particular member group, that should exist somewhere, right? Can I get to it? Meaning, in the template I’d like to output the “publish” custom fields in one spot, followed by the “date” fields in another spot. I’m pretty sure it’s saved to the db so in theory I should be able to fetch it.
Any ideas? Thanks!
No built-in way, no. Keep in mind one field could be grouped in several different ways based on member group and assigned channel (field groups being able to be assigned to >1 channel and hence displayed differently on the related Publish pages).
That makes sense, thanks for the quick reply. Is there a “not built-in” way? Something 3rd party or a lead on how we might write something custom?
I haven’t seen anyone want to display CP groupings on the front end. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done - maybe your first add-on?
Maybe! I suppose our need is less about CP groupings on the front end and more about simple meta data of custom fields. I don’t actually need to group them in the CP; I just figured since that schema already existed, I could tap into it. Do you know of some other way to group custom fields together for front end display? Good example would be a form with multiple pages of fields (for which none of the available 3rd party form add-ons do the job that we need).
That’s not a puzzle I’ve ever had to solve, sorry.